ANTE MERIDIEM WITH NOELLE KOCOT
conversation with the poet at Glow Festival

Found, 4 a.m. A buoy advertising

“The Poetry Boat” floats on the festival’s map.

She’s two miles offshore tasting plum

succulent ancient ring finger dinners,

poems cumming out her drunk.

Once she whispered on a page:

      I sift through the edges of the wind

      and drink to remember you.

I stumble through sand to find it,

a rotary phone and chair pinned to the beach.

I wait in a line of high school belligerence,

a thousand teenagers opaquely squawking flirtation.

So it seems a thousand. Everything’s gleaming here.

Teens have the sweetest of tannins. Their fructose blinds.

But who here really knows the basket of train parts,

Noelle Kocot?

Other poets are on board out there with her,

sharing their desserts with her fork.

Her fork touches her fillings

with the tip of her tongue every 3 seconds.

That’s where the poem is first born.

Like virgin births. Trade Winds.

Poppy seed small talk.

I sit down in the sandy chair.

Phone rings. I pick up.

Listen for a deep vocal swarm.

There’s a sleeping crowd in the stadium of my ribs.

Stirring. I hear a glass of Fuck clanging in her extremities.

A creaking sublet of a give.

Letting of words. Hello?

Hello, she responds.

I’m gonna read you a poem from—

Wait, I interrupt.

Silence.

I’d like to read you something instead, Noelle.

I could recite a poem of your own

or a poem from a book in my bag

by Jeffrey McDaniel called “Absence”.

There’s a tiny wireless static anticipation.

Moldy lymph-fused rocketships of paralysis await.

She requests McDaniel. She requests

the raking of my lips over her earwax

to create fingers for catching upper case talk.

I read,

“On the scales of desire, your absence weighs more than…”

Any sufficed dull taste of techno-fire,

which plummets from my articulation,

out of this phone cord and into her lap.

She and McDaniel wear long-sleeved loneliness

for the Infinite season.

I am a dribble from a boo-hoo. A tiny,

concentric tingle encircling a cockroach.

“someone else’s presence.”

Silence.

Wow, she says. I’ve always been

a big fan of Jeffrey’s. Thank you.

Goodnight, we say. Hanging up feels like I’ve made

a matchstick out of myopia’s resin but can’t quite strike it.