Alan Catlin
Alan Catlin has published dozens of chapbooks and full length books. His most recent book is Wild Beauty from Future Cycle Press. He is poetry editor of misfitmagazine.net
Knitting
Even as kids, we thought
how odd it was, one of our
friend’s mom would
be knitting, never dropping
a stitch, while watching
daytime soap operas.
The odd thing was not
so much the knitting itself,
but the finished product:
perfect hangman’s nooses.
What could they be for?
We were always afraid
to ask.
In the architect’s dream
all the buildings are made
of flat iron, all the fragments
of plans of who we would become,
corrupted, virally infected as
computers can be before
countermeasures to the disease
can be effected, before all the data
is breached, monitors disabled,
blank screens, and total disconnection,
the new normal making users like
Alzheimer patients left behind
in nursing homes after a flood,
their mouths moving, forming
words that have no meaning.
Sheila-Na-Gig online 