Dion Farquhar


Baker's Dozen

1.      I am nonplussed it costs five dollars
          to go down on the escalator. I opt to walk.

2.      Ginger in labor with her second child
          a week. I visit, tell her, it's not so bad.

3.      I am on the corner of Broadway and Spring, screaming at Paul
          What are you doing here if you're still with Sylvia? Get out.

4.      At a party in a Blade Runner Chicago lakefront high-rise
          with twenty-somethings wearing Puritan hats and jackets

5.      My shrink who is Marcel Marceau
          says he can fit Nicole in on July 4th.

6.      It's not worth mentioning that the current contenders
          for president are Buddy Holly and Elvis

7.      The UPS man comes to the door, tells me Richard
          has died from staring into a mirror, in bed.

8.      I am having dinner with Susan Sontag, who’s dead. I tell her I turned down
          tenure track jobs in the middle of nowhere. She says, You’d have perished
          in those hell holes.

9.      I am being introduced at a packed lecture. No words come. No book, tenure.
          Silence. A woman from the audience shouts, Get on with it, She's from
           behind the Hamburger Curtain.

10.    I am a fast white sports car into which David cannot fit
          so he drives by flying over me, steering through my open top

11.    The kids have taken me prisoner,
          and they're still on formula.

12.    I am completely neutral as a crazy runs through the supermarket
          pulling every can and box off the shelves, a conflagration of spam and seltzer

13.    Hesitantly, I ask a graduate school teacher if I can borrow his tie.
          He takes it off, hands it to me. Everything is the same.

Dion Farquhar was born in 1947 and cannot believe the numbers. Daily, she relishes contradiction, email, and the salvage of lost community. Formed by the Sixties and repudiating nothing, she met the love of her life in 1992, had twin sons in ’93, and gave up being bicoastal in 2000, with the west coast winning. Though increasingly happy and adjusted to the perks of great weather and enough space, she still misses New York, her sister and her old friends, and off-off Broadway theatre. When not “raising” two amazing 13-year-old boys, enjoying two minutes with her partner or a few local friends, and either looking for work or working for money as an online writing tutor, lecturer, or editor, she is writing or reading. Currently, she is finishing a novel about her generation's formation. Poems have, or will, appear/ed in LanguageandCulture.net, Main Street Rag, Poems Niederngasse, OBAN 06, The Argotist, Perigee, Xcp: Streetnotes, Rogue Scholars, City Works, boundary 2, Hawaii Review, Cream City Review, Sinister Wisdom, Painted Bride Quarterly, etc.



 
 
 
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