Poetry
Nonfiction
Fiction
Cover Art
God Is a Library
Cynthia Atkins
If you look under G in the card catalog,
a hunched-over landlady will rent you
a space made of dust, albeit, a little domain
of quiet—where the rent is cheap and so
is the debt, and silence is not morbid.
On these premises, text and rhetoric
mix a sexy playground for words. Yes, Pygmalion
played us like a violin, logarithms chased
the tail of a dog in moss. Exquisite human machine
of pathos and debris, allowed the pages to be set
on letter-press, then ink bled and seeped
into a refinery of senses. All the kids played
hopscotch on a city street. We’re polar-opposites
on a stage of belief, fact and faith. Yes, Borges
digressed for an atheist and an Aleph. Delinquent,
these prophets and scholars broke the dress-code
in favor of out-of-fashion souls. Two students
knock knees to make contact. Egg to sperm,
pen to pulp—ideas took flight to where our
better angels reside, where chairs are stacked
on tables at the end of the day.
Cynthia Atkins is the author of Psyche’s Weathers and In The Event of Full Disclosure. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including, Alaska Quarterly Review, BOMB, Cleaver Magazine, Cultural Weekly, Del Sol Review, Florida Review, Green Mountains Review, Harpur Palate, Hermeneutic Chaos, Le Zaporogue, North American Review, Seneca Review, Tampa Review, Valparaiso Review, and Verse Daily, and nominated for a 2015 Pushcart Prize. Atkins earned her MFA from Columbia University. She was formerly assistant director for the Poetry Society of America, and most recently, an assistant professor of English at Virginia Western Community College. Atkins lives on the Maury River of Rockbridge County, VA with her family.