Try a Little Time Travel
Natalie Lyalin
July 2010
I Love Those Stags
I mounted the fake stag.
This one had necklaces hanging on his antlers.
I predicted he could actually hear me.
I was tired.
See, I had been blanching and icing all day.
Also making delicately fried chicken.
I provided cloth napkins for everyone.
They all came over and we drank.
Some said this was a happy moment.
Some promised to never return.
I mounted a cold fake animal in the night.
The highway glittered out like real America racing in circles.
Why, why, why, did they all not go home?
I provided chicken, napkins, opportunity—all of these things.
Still, those crazy cold stags refused to leave.
With a tender stomachache I pretended to dry heave into a bucket.
This sent them galloping into the uncertain night.
Try a Little Time Travel is a study of careening through time, danger in the woods, and lost children. It explores the theme of safety and uncertainty in everyday things. It could be a meditation on the monsters all around us. It could be a good argument for the creation of a time machine. Or it could be a great reason not to ever try.
Eastern European Poets Series #27.
About the Author
Natalie Lyalin is the author of Pink & Hot Pink Habitat (Coconut Books, 2009), and a chapbook, Try A Little Time Travel (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). She is a part of the Agnes Fox Press editing collective and the cofounder and editor of Natural History Press. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at The University of the Arts.
Praise
Natalie Lyalin is writing some of the best poems in the world. There is an evil in her gorgeous poem-hearts. She must have sold her heart to the devil to write like this—so beautiful, so funny and so strange. Her images stack and stack down the page without spilling, each line such a bombshell you'll start reading backward to the first line. These poems are like babies—they will pop out of trees.
Zachary Schomburg
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Publication Details
Hand-bound. 28 pp, 5.5 x 7.5 in
Publication Date: July 30 2010
Series: Eastern European Poets Series #27