Karen Schubert, "Cutting Ties"

Karen Schubert

Cutting Ties

The first is thick
like an umbilical cord, you hear

the gristle and cry out, it is hard
to cut and you bleed. The

next is thinner, like rope
made of conversation, each

twist springs back in release,
the edges are uneven. Then

thinner, like fiber optics,
the pulse of erotic dreams,

books you both read,
going dark with every

snip, then the thinnest, like
a single hair, one last nick

and you float away.
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Karen Schubert’s chapbook is The Geography of Lost Houses (Pudding House); her poems are in Zoland Poetry, Redactions, 42opus and Slant. She has received awards from AAP and dA Center for the Arts, was a recent visiting writer at Texas A&M-Commerce, and is poetry editor for Whiskey Island Magazine.
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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
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