Jaime Warburton


User’s Manual in Middle Age
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I please only myself as long as I’m alone: every thought & each step a sweet shiver.
It’s a race with no end. I get down to worship & feel these knees quiver.

Everything’s hilarious until I wail in self-pity – and even still, it is, a little.
Let me tell you about leaving the bottle, like every other now-sober feast-giver:

“I found a body, once, & it was mine!” (Or was it hers?)
The chalk outlives the rain. The arrows are all re-quivered.

What’s a bigness, anyway? What’s a hunger? What’s an inhale?
Looking up at the stars like any old creatures, we eat whole the sweet shiver.

A joke: once there was a rabbi & a priest & both were alive.
That’s it, that’s the joke! Can’t help it: God’s a cheap gift-giver.

Look around for the soul & tell me when you find us.
Where are we now? Somewhere behind your meat-liver?

But I’m always a jester — to whom, Warbs? How about you shut up & deliver.
The only fourth wall to break is your own, so look: live here.

 

Head Lines

“I don’t want to be a person. I want to be unbearable.”
 —Anne Carson, Decreation

Will ghost sharks disappear
before scientists get the chance
to study them? asks the newspaper.

—Does pseudophilosophy encourage
self-indulgent thinking? —Will a micro-
wave turn chicken into arsenic?

I have a thing or two to say,
but none of it matters, much, I’m afraid,
much like the scientist & shark & all.

I heat a shrieking potato, shriveling steam
in the microwave. Entice a hunched cat
onto the porch. I think

of my loves, all ill-fated.
Likely I will do both
anything & nothing,

or I will do nothing
& think everything,
which seems more likely.

What’s a thing but a thought ::
what is a do
but a move :: what is incarnate

but the time before death?
I’m too proud to try. Proud
is another word for “afraid

someone will see something
I haven’t.” Pass me that hat & show
me what’s inside. A secret?

Perhaps there is no reasonable way to live.
Perhaps I am as absurd as a mole rat
wearing a bowler hat on his way to work

in the sun. Perhaps I’ll love just as the mole
loves his walking stick and spats. Perhaps
I am only the celluloid collar to a suit.

I stop myself like a tub.
Why waste the water?
Why not a skin-skim circle

like salt before the threshold?
If scum rises, I’m at the top
with my memories:

me, sitting in a care-home recliner, waiting
to play my flute, listening to the voices. Honey,
says a widower talking to his ghost, let’s make a break
for it. Come on. How long do we have to stay here, after all?

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Jaime Warburton (MFA, Sarah Lawrence College) is the author of the chapbook Note That They Cannot Live Happily. Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in publications such as North American Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Book of Matches, Sequestrum, Storyscape, The Nervous Breakdown, The Collagist, and The Southeast Review. Jaime lives and teaches in Ithaca, NY.
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