If i could be anything in the world that flew
I would be a bat and come swooping after you


Maggie Taylor, Fading Away

Three poems by Noah Falck

-- from his new chapbook Measuring Tape for the Midwest

Confessions Inside a Pickup Line

If you have ever used the word sinister
in a conversation about Saturday morning cartoons,

changed facial expressions more than once
during an answering machine exchange,

turned into a werewolf at the sight of a Starbuscks cafe,
driven through an entire state with your left turn signal on,

aimlessly pioneered across uncharted dance floors,

or tried to rewrite the bible with the characters of Happy Days

then we should exchange phone numbers.


Brief Scene Without Cell Phones Ringing

I swivel my head
revealing unrehearsed
blank stares

beneath a sky the color
of swallowed olives
dipped in cigar ash

and like a sneeze
the long awaited silence
comes and goes.


What Comes From Loneliness

Today is a new version of yesterday
shaped like the color gray, which starts another sky.

Flags fetter the wind from the horizon
where fog rests among an assembly of scrawny hills

and "the rain is not done yet," I say to myself.

This is obvious, but I repeat it anyway
because the moosehead hanging over the mantle

looks so real the instant I flick the lights on
and I thought he might like to hear my forecast.


-- back Tuesday