No Innocent Eye. Number Two in the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series, selected by Ron Mohring and Eduardo C. Corral.

Cover: vintage block print, 1917, courtesy of Leaping Frog designs [leapingfrogdesigns.blogspot.com].

Published: March 20, 2014 [150 copies]
22 pages
$9.00

Rhett Watts has had poems appear in Spoon River Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Ekphrasis, The Cape Rock, Defined Providence, Yankee, Peregrine, online at Slapering Hol (newsletter), and other journals. Her work has been included in the books Knitting into the Mystery and The Best Spiritual Writing 2000. Rhett leads AWA writing workshops in Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and cat. She received her MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is also a visual artist who works in pastel and oil.

Insomnia

No matter how you turn or twist yourself, you can’t get out
of that central point (between your eyes).
–M.C. Escher

Opening a door in my foot, I drain tension,
ponder sitting with the patience of daisies,
wonder at the irony of publishing
the secrets of Buddhist sects.

Thoughts trot by like the neighbor’s cat.
Day’s garble reading sputters in blinking neon.
Storyboarding the image flow, I cut figure eights
in mental ice, pattern dance steps in hopes of tiring.

Compensatory mechanisms to form a unified field,
how pigeons gain depth perception by bobbing their heads.
For even the sun, die-hard Dem, tilts away from us.
How to be friendly to what’s given.

Rest. Sleep.
I stir my dream cauldron, ladle out a miniature
polar bear in a slotted spoon while overhead
Escher floats through the Alhambra.

Moorish arch, hanging whale skeleton–
the apex, and the Ocean of Kansas,
empty as a capsized boat or
the cages at Bird Land.

Waking, someone speaks with night logic,
faster than speech, slower than the mind’s flash,
Words are flowers that burn.
Read them, and wet fire. 

• Please click here to purchase Rhett’s chapbook.