Name that rune by Michelle Noteboom

A tisket, a tasket, what’s he got in his basket? Supersize vacuum-packed variations on a smoking gun. In the tale he was tragic, aristocratic and ever so slightly bovine, emblematic of an indentured century and a Holiday Inn. Unbathed homunculus in a wobbling machine. Let’s clink to that. (Ce choufleur qui s’écroule dans son cœur…) Some thing’s amiss.
Yes, we have no Krispy Kremes, so treat yrself to a pair of odor-eaters instead (after maneuvering the emotional minefield and coming out unscathed). Shhhhh, the white noise just got whiter or else the gnashing of a million-some mandibles out there in the tiny field. Indigenous smog. It should be illegal to have hands that soft and what they held was less an instrument than an extension. Bipolar exposure of unstudied vistas is not some day in day out kind of thing. Anthracite satellite circling the earth, hydroponic disciples of the real; but then the cows come home to roost in the shed of new light and before you know it the horizon is gone. As a boy he dreamed of being a Tesla coil wrangler but wound up with an MBA instead. Making snides in the world. Pinafores and patent leather, the better to reflect you with, my dear. The bug on his finger wasn’t exactly squashed though not necessarily thriving either. Schizophrenia translates sweetly into first-world guilt.



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Michelle Noteboom won the 2006 Heartland Poetry Prize for her first book Edging (Cracked Slab Books). Other work has appeared in Verse, Fence, Boston Review, Sentence, Columbia Poetry Review and MiPOesias, among others. She's lived mainly in Paris since 1991 where she co-curates the Ivy Writers Reading Series with Jennifer K. Dick. She works as a freelance translator in the French audiovisual industry. She also translates French poetry.


This is part of a series of poems from invited poets. Previous contributors were Luke Heeley, Joe Ross, George Szirtes, Elizabeth Spackman, Ivy Alvarez, Rufo Quintavalle and Todd Swift. Illustration by Jonathan Wonham.