Concept A:, and: Instruction B: How to be an artist/wife, and: Tulips for kissing: modern love

Abstract

Concept A:, and: Instruction B: How to be an artist/wife, and: Tulips for kissing: modern love Cindy Carlson (bio) Concept A: Conceptualism: philosophical aphorism: a certain amount is plenty of lemons/thread the needle unseen and familiar. Second place is/compelling her through time disentangled tangledism, geometrical grids. Often merged, emerged more or less a judged book. This attracts me: constant and learned intolerable loss of meaning. When you say girlfriend, you’ve said it all. [End Page 89] Instruction B: How to be an artist/wife Forms she absorbed and assimilated—simulated and practiced the trip. Her own happy husband/happy/home. Freeing latent visual memories, she left for CA as teenager. Stripped texts brazenly intuitive/she worked abstractly on babies, decorations. Intellectually felt, at least or lastly imagined palpable presence, in a way. Thrust again into light, spot or soft white, she forgot the instructions. Happyhusband/happywife/happylife/happyhome/trigger happyhome/less/happy hus/bone—she couldn’t remember, couldn’t help repeating lines snorting onions, singing the last YA she read or was it the one she’d write—she didn’t know. She wasn’t sorry. [End Page 90] Tulips for kissing: modern love Spring coils eternal from the curbed mattress. In close proximity of the far removed, the real self emerges the stylized. Here the layers of meaning lie. Trustworthy and together and at least until the end of April: She wants a dress for the wedding, she doesn’t need to want a dress. She wants a party for the dress, she doesn’t want. She wants to admit she wanted a dress, she couldn’t because dresses don’t arrive overnight unless you pay dearly. She wants for all wanting, spring and the forever but realizes that shipment has sailed. [End Page 91] Cindy Carlson Cindy Carlson wrote her first poem on a birch tree. She now lives, teaches, sings, and writes in Madison, WI. Her work has appeared in Sentence, Shampoo, Bloom, The Madison Review, Transom, among other fine literary journals. She received her BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Copyright © 2017 University of Wisconsin Board of Regents