More Enlightenment Ideas

I like a fine incision,
a field of moving rain,

flat black thunder

considering the body
is hard to inhabit,
considering (coldly)
the faculty of reason favors
whip, leash, collar,
and we don’t know
what’s down there

a soul, or
just more animal
than I care to handle.

ξ

“More Enlightenment Ideas" was first published in Denver Quarterly.

Carolie Parker is a visual artist and writer with a background in foreign languages and art history. She was recently a MacDowell Fellow and a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Her poetry has appeared in Sixth Finch, The Yale Review, Denver Quarterly and River Styx. What Books Press published Mirage Industry, a book-length collection of her poetry, in 2016. In 2019, the Fellows of Contemporary Art selected her for a Curator’s Lab Award, which funded an exhibition focusing on the relationship between language and visual image. She has exhibited her visual work widely in Los Angeles (images on Instagram @carolieparker). She holds a BFA in studio art from UC Irvine and an MA in comparative literature from UCLA (Latin American, US and French poetry).

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