9th Annual Juried Reading Finalist

Mackenzie Lynn Carignan
Mackenzie is studying at UIC right now, pursuing her Ph.D. in Creative Writing. She received her Master's from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She recently won the AWP Intro awards for poetry in 2001 and the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Award in 2002. She has also acted on the editorial staff of several literary magazines, including Sniper Logic, Square One, and BlueSky Review. She has also done many projects with collaboration, including fusing poetry and dance, poetry and live music, and poetry and representational visual art. She is co-founder and co-director of the Chicago Fuzion project, a collaborative arts organization.

cata strophe
"Beyond this point, there are only catastrophes. Perfect is the event or language which assumes its own mode of disappearance, knows how to stage it, and thus reaches the maximal energy of appearances " -Jean Baudrillard, "Ecstasy and Inertia "

I thought this word cut open would bleed white,
phrases climbing out of white thrum, this

tongue knot not, the unfinished acupuncture
of alphabet. Chemical clandestiny.

I thought by being terrified I could
cancel out my own fear. Left with: frozen

bodystretch of lake, a warning
of snow, possibility colored- even

tasting-orange. The sky broken
into tiers of cloud. Same. I do not realize-

it is almost morning. Already the window
is widening, leaves like lips are

frosted, this cold so hard it breaks
a sweat. I cannot let it go, even to speak,

this breath I hide
in my lungs for keeping.

-- Mackenzie Lynn Carignan

© 2003 The Poetry Center of Chicago
All Rights Revert Back to the Author Upon Publication.
No Portion of this poem may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author.