PoetryMagazine.com Wendy Taylor Carlisle

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Since 1996 Volume XXI

Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and works in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of two books of poetry and three chapbooks. Her most recent publication is Persephone on the Metro, MadHat Press (2014). Her work has been nominated for Best of the Web and the Pushcart Prize. Read about her at wendytaylorcarlisle.com.

“Frog is Already Elsewhere”

When Frog came knocking, you were shocked.

Delighted, you let him in.

Amphibians.

Sun up and he’s gone.
Another one-night stand you spin to your family as a miscalculation.

This charade goes on until you’re fed up with him.

You give him a heave at the shutters.

Splat.

Instead of tepid skin and bulging eyes, there’s a cold-blooded stranger in your bed
and frog is elsewhere.

Elsewhere, where the nights were when you giggled and tossed that ball.

Already he has become the click of ice in your glass, the tick of your champagne flute against his when you were at ease.

Frog is elsewhere, not in your father’s ballroom or throne room.

Frog is elsewhere, under the scrumptious pond scum or out behind the palace, wailing.

You cry too.

You weep for the frog’s mouth, for being swallowed whole by good times,

enchanted by a dance band and a green new moon.

Title from “Everyone Was in Love” by Galway Kinnell