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DORIANNE LAUX

It's Better to turn on the TV than to Curse the Darkness


Better to gallop across the dry creek beds
of Nevada  with Ben, Adam, Hoss and Little Joe,
to watch the burning borders of The Pondersa
from the contours of the couch, better to unwrap
an ice cream sandwich at 2 am and follow those boys 
through silver brush, camp out under the pinwheel stars, 
their re-run horses snorting mesquite woodsmoke. 

Better to flip to the Discovery Channel
with its nano-resolution electron microscopes,
its parasites who never change their minds,
where whales laugh and plankton cry
and atoms make quick decisions.

Best to turn to the crime channel, someone's wise
and cellulite-ridden mother admonishing her daughter 
in somber tones to never wear a dress to jail. 

You must hurry past the late-night stations of the cross, 
the red velvet hell-fire preachers, spotlit Jesus
hanging from the rafters in his drooping diaper
and spiky crown of thorns.

Better Miracle Grow and Pizza Hut commercials, 
interviews with survivors of hurricanes and earthquakes,
the up close and personal surgical separation
of conjoined twins, nail guns and sawhorses on This Old House.  
 
Better Cartman and his cardboard brothers,
better black and white stock footage of the bomb,
better TV than the nightmare that woke you--
learning to swim, trying not to drown--a technicolor angel 
rising through the waves, your body in her arms,
limp as a gauzy pieta. 
 
Get a bottle of good vodka, maybe some Grey Goose
or Russian Standard, a carton of orange juice
without the pulp.  Do not despair. Turn the channel.
Lean back and wait for dawn to break and enter.




58   The Paris-American

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Dorianne Laux’s most recent collections are The Book of Men and Facts About the Moon, both available from W.W. Norton. She and her husband, poet Joseph Millar, moved to Raleigh in 2008 where she teaches in and directs the MFA program at North Carolina State University. A National Book Critics' Circle Award and Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize Finalist, Laux's other honors include a Pushcart Prize, two Best American Poetry selections, two NEA Fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Recent poems appear in APR, Cimarron Review, Tin House, and The Valparaiso Review.

   
   Next week's poet:

 Matthew Zingg
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