Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art
  • About
    • Masthead
    • Submissions
    • Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award
    • NJ High School Writing Contest
    • In Print
    • Subscribe
    • Links
    • Internship Opportunity
    • WPU MFA
  • Poetry
    • Richard Ryal
    • Sherwood Anderson
    • Mark DeCarteret
    • Dennis Hinrichsen Poetry
    • Daniel Biegelson
    • Natan Last
    • Jim Daniels Poetry
    • Michael Chang
    • D E Steward
    • Benjamin Paloff Poetry
    • David Dodd Lee
    • Isabelle Doyle
    • Kathleen Heil
    • Leonard Kress
    • Lauren Tess
    • Cesca Janece Waterfield
    • Billy Cancel Poetry
    • Scott Minar
    • Greg Glazner
    • Bruce McRae
    • Maureen Thorson
  • Fiction
    • On Experimental Fiction
    • Mark Cassidy, "How I Met My Wife"
    • Emily Trachtenberg, "Plum"
    • Hector Donovan-Gonzalez
    • Christopher Linforth, "Zia"
    • Jenessa Abrams, "You Never Wish That Upon Anyone"
    • Eros Livieratos, "On Feeling"
    • Halsted M. Bernard, "Your Hands"
    • Justin Meckes, "The Gash"
    • Reb Livingston, from "Bombyonder"
    • Craig Foltz, "Without Stigma"
  • Nonfiction
    • Martha Wiseman, "Loose Ends"
    • Jan Jolly, "Through My Father's Glasses"
    • Kristina Moriconi, "Still Looking"
    • Wm. Anthony Connolly, "IGY"
    • Cal Freeman, "Loosestrife"
    • W.F. Lantry, "The Strange Beauty of the Unfamiliar"
    • Michael Roloff, "Accretion"
    • Andrew Sunshine, "John Hancock's John Hancock"
    • Diane Payne, "3 micro memoirs"
    • Luc Sante, "Flesh and Bone"
    • Isobel O'Hare, "Failure: A Love Letter"
    • Melissa Wiley, "Barbed Wire Fence"
    • Ashley Wilkinson, "fractional distillation"
  • Art
Picture

Noelle Kocot

After the Purity


Boredom is anger?  So you say.  Paramount
Music with its struck pitch, I never meant
You to be a mere guest in my petunia pot!
The dimmed philosophy gunning thick in
My blood, my boring purity & its gory shadow,
How can anyone take the figurative nib
With its occasional bristling and put it away
Somewhere warm?  The last few seconds
Of a dream pass once, pass twice, now, there,
You can hold onto them.  Sweetness of an
Itch, the rise of chaos through the leaves,
An imaginary river running through my
Numbed toes.  It is the greenness of love,
What I'm telling you shamefully, a bird perched
On a cone in the middle of nowhere—where I
Eat and drink beyond compromise, con vigor.



The Age of Anxiety


I won't edit this storm.  The mirrored sidewalks
Can be imagined by these shadows, the face

Leaping from lamplight.  If you abhor doors,
How will you then sleep the temperature of

The golden day?  Scavengers—you go elsewhere.
Surrender first the smoke that comes from

Thinking with its mad colors of pilgrims and
Jump.  I have a sure sign of periphery

And distance.  The bright numerals do their
Dance, and the windows hang open like a threat.



11.3.14


Stigma of stigmas—since when have I cared?
The paramount sky, our pleasures, our thoughts

Are only yawns.  A fugue, a blossom.  The life
Brims.  Content to be a lake—oh, who would

Offer me that much?  A glass of wine, a dream
At a river.  My trusted ones, who will take you

For a glass of lemonade, clasp your legs with
Inevitability?  We are carrying on to the sun we know,

And we will meet again.  Site brimming with
Natural law, the moony extinction of our blood,

Charm without sleep, shamefaced, we start out.   



Picture
Noelle Kocot is the author of six books of poems, most recently, Soul in Space (Wave Books, 2013). She has also translated some of the poems of Tristan Corbiere from French, and they appear in a book called Poet by Default (Wave, 2011). Noelle has won numerous awards for her work, including those from The Academy of American Poets, The American Poetry Review, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Lannan Literary Foundation and The Fund for Poetry. Her work has been widely anthologized, including in Best American Poetry 2001, 2012 and 2013 and in Postmodern American Poems, a Norton Anthology. Her work has been translated and read in at least 15 different countries. She was born and raised in Brooklyn and now lives in New Jersey and teaches writing in New York City.
published by
The Department of English
College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
The William Paterson University of New Jersey
Copyright © 2012-2022 Map Literary
Map Literary

Promote Your Page Too
Free E-Subscription
Callaloo: African Arts
On Innovative Fiction
Huizache: Latino Lit
Veterans Writing
Asian Writers
Picture
  • About
    • Masthead
    • Submissions
    • Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award
    • NJ High School Writing Contest
    • In Print
    • Subscribe
    • Links
    • Internship Opportunity
    • WPU MFA
  • Poetry
    • Richard Ryal
    • Sherwood Anderson
    • Mark DeCarteret
    • Dennis Hinrichsen Poetry
    • Daniel Biegelson
    • Natan Last
    • Jim Daniels Poetry
    • Michael Chang
    • D E Steward
    • Benjamin Paloff Poetry
    • David Dodd Lee
    • Isabelle Doyle
    • Kathleen Heil
    • Leonard Kress
    • Lauren Tess
    • Cesca Janece Waterfield
    • Billy Cancel Poetry
    • Scott Minar
    • Greg Glazner
    • Bruce McRae
    • Maureen Thorson
  • Fiction
    • On Experimental Fiction
    • Mark Cassidy, "How I Met My Wife"
    • Emily Trachtenberg, "Plum"
    • Hector Donovan-Gonzalez
    • Christopher Linforth, "Zia"
    • Jenessa Abrams, "You Never Wish That Upon Anyone"
    • Eros Livieratos, "On Feeling"
    • Halsted M. Bernard, "Your Hands"
    • Justin Meckes, "The Gash"
    • Reb Livingston, from "Bombyonder"
    • Craig Foltz, "Without Stigma"
  • Nonfiction
    • Martha Wiseman, "Loose Ends"
    • Jan Jolly, "Through My Father's Glasses"
    • Kristina Moriconi, "Still Looking"
    • Wm. Anthony Connolly, "IGY"
    • Cal Freeman, "Loosestrife"
    • W.F. Lantry, "The Strange Beauty of the Unfamiliar"
    • Michael Roloff, "Accretion"
    • Andrew Sunshine, "John Hancock's John Hancock"
    • Diane Payne, "3 micro memoirs"
    • Luc Sante, "Flesh and Bone"
    • Isobel O'Hare, "Failure: A Love Letter"
    • Melissa Wiley, "Barbed Wire Fence"
    • Ashley Wilkinson, "fractional distillation"
  • Art