Time Crunch

TIME CRUNCH

"The textured and lyrically lush narratives in Time Crunch— deftly honed poems that titillate and resound long after their last lines—firmly establish Cathy Colman as a fierce and formidable voice destined to be a stalwart voice in the contemporary canon."
—Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art

"Cathy Colman’s third collection Time Crunch pulses with lyric ingenuity. Deeply felt, these poems are grounded in the mythological, the literary, the filmic, the embodied & the scientific. The breadth of this collection’s wide enough to coax Janis Joplin, Samuel Beckett & Thelonius Monk into the same dance with exacting choreography. She writes ‘Because I have been so many women, none of them able to sleep' and this polyphonic historical multiplicity beckons the reader in as we are drawn through this remarkable book."
--sam sax, author of bury it

from Time Crunch:

Leda, Outside El Paso, Texas

…. another unslept night    outside, the catclaw

trees, jagged shadows

the grass like knives

drawn from Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet.

I’m bleached by moonlight.

I cover myself with autobiography,

a frayed blanket, dark dissonant wind

chimes,     mother’s frail sea-voice.

Nothing works so I go back    to the bar

where he still sits clutching

gold rush brew    nothing between us

except his salt

breath     a large man like a chunk of broken off

        mountain.

... and suddenly we’re

in the weeds     he wants me to be nothing, his

nothing, just like my father did.

He wants me like that,    prime-

numbered and factored-out, wearing infinity’s

clothes.

He enters me rutting, his weight pinning me

       as if gravity gave him an extra dose.

I dig my nails into the hard winter

of his back, bite      his leathery shoulder

….then he’s gone as I lie under the neon

flashing: Vacancy

I strip off to

burrow into

                   bed,    the stirred-up

dark     like river dirt

in a storm      rolling over and over,

                           writhing with nearly visible

snakes    when daybreak forces

itself into my eyes

as I pull another

feather     from my mouth…