Bad Posture

Carlina Duan

dreaming about fat grapes off a vine, not here but somewhere out there all that purple juice still dreaming about ice cream scoops & the tread of my Nashville bike inherited from John who inherited from Kelsey who got secondhand from the store with the billboard for Vintage Army Supplies dreaming about swerving over potholes and the gas station where, standing next to Sophie, a man said My granddaughter had a friend she was an Oriental not dreaming now but remembering, really the silence the way he looked completely past my body that had once dreamt about eating grapes while pedaling to a friend’s apartment my body that had moved and moved past his body on the way to fill up Unleaded I am not dreaming really but recounting or recalling or I suppose you could say retelling the story only Slant dreaming about Emily Dickinson’s fascicles stitched tightly by thread at the spine in my body I am a body on the asphalt of the Southern gas station parking lot in another life looking through the man and dreaming about all the lives I will live giddy & delicious full of fruit & freedom & fat

Carlina Duan is a writer from Michigan. She is the author of I Wore My Blackest Hair (Little A, 2017) and Alien Miss (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021). Carlina received her M.F.A. from Vanderbilt University and is currently a doctoral student in the University of Michigan’s Joint Program in English and Education. Her poems have been published in Poetry, Poets.org, Narrative, and The Rumpus, among other places. Find her at www.carlinaduan.com.