Captions for Cartoons Not Yet Drawn

by Celia Bland

Captions for Cartoons Not Yet Drawn: Premature Anticipation

Caption 1.     Anticipation is premature when she starts sweating

On a high stool before plate glass.

 

Caption 2:     It’s photo realism: city grays, a

red coat moving, a man loping

smoking in black.

 

Caption 3:     She is writing, pretending not to have…

So he will call out to her.

 

Caption 4:     Anticipation is sweating on a high stool

waiting before a bank of plate glass, writing

about waiting in fuzzy red

diary he never asked to read, never asked

to fuck her, his friend who bummed

cigarettes and coffee who

listened who complained who took to

wearing tight clothes.

 

Caption 5:     The glass window, the goldfish

view, a square tank and she is

sunk.

Captions for Cartoons Not Yet Drawn: 7 Reece Mews, Francis Bacon’s Studio

Caption 1:    It’s a crime noun, adjective, adjective,

the oversized places

and things, the bookshelves, the

paint blossoming tissue

anemones, adjectives and blood.

 

Caption 2:    Under the bed: article

dildo, article box of past-participled

adjectival claims, and human

teeth; balled-up proverb.

 

Caption 3:    The violence of an absence

like an opened noun, outlined

in dog, gnash, innocent the tenth,

caesura.  What draws pronoun

to these stretcher broken bars?

 

Caption 4:    The turps stink adverb.  Some

pronoun has expired and I

and me and you,

we gerund, furiously

gerund

 

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Celia Bland teaches at Bard College where she is also the director of College Writing. Her collection of poetry, Soft Box, is available from CavanKerry Press.