Two Poems by Carleen Tibbetts

many days are often mine

the bed is made of sentences/sentences granting freedom/is there a spectral sentence?/I have
very little to say to myself/for love the fingers closed for recovery/sleep offers an excuse
for/timeless satisfaction/the imagination has flesh to destroy/imagination must keep track of the
flesh responding/the mouth is just a body filled with imagination

our tenderness gives us sentences about our mistakes

the future is fortune’s form/the sleepable gap between the world and mind/clumsily impossible
love/ we sing to ourselves/hours of necessity and sense/days arrive like ships/hot with life/time
is unwavering in its uselessness/strange and hollow sounds/troubled by such a color/thrown to
song

Carleen Tibbetts is the author of dossier for the postverbal (Carrion Bloom Books, 2023) and DATACLYSM.jpg (White Stag, 2019). Her work has appeared widely in print and online publication including Sink, jubilat, The Pinch, Notre Dame Review, Dreginald, mercury firs, and the tiny.