Rooftop Poetry Club - Caroline Hagood

Caroline Hagood

Bio:
Caroline Hagood graduated from Vassar College with a B.A. in English. She is a poet, film critic, and freelance writer. She recently finished a collection of poetry entitled “Cinemagination: My Life in Film” and is currently working on her first novel. Her poetry has appeared in Hanging Loose, Oxymoron, Movin’, and Verse on Vellum. She is a film critic for Popcorn Junkies, and has also published in Campus Progress. She currently resides in Buffalo, N.Y. where she founded the Elmwood Writer’s Group.

After Silence of the Lambs

Subtle aneurysms
leaking bleating bottles of blood
silent breathing
the baby sheep brought sleep at last
somewhere the hum
of gathered beetle bugs at play
against the dapper dusk
shrill music heard night long
rest beat one two and so on
reaching four and five by dawn

Rapping trapped syllables
a woman found at the bottom of a well
body turned bloody white
in luminous blades of light
extinguished she tried to find her way
like Alice lost in Thunderland

Seen in this light
an air-raped stratosphere lingers on
holding moon-made thought systems
and the elusive evidence
of falling stars
spelling lovely death tales
whispering of the breastfed child
the river wild the falling leaves

Topography a map fashioned
from severed bits of skin
traced madly with severed fingers
a face for the moon
man-made woman parts worn
in private piracy of mind
raining down upon the earth
transforming many colors into rhyme

This the body
these the bones changing
the poet transfigured
when skin-grafted telephone poles
call out softly in the wind
in the end a snake-of-itself-eating
put the world in the drum of her ear
and she was fallen

At Last

Here
where not even the light
can find me
at one with the mist
I notice the spinning life of insects
the smallness of the impossibly deep
the leaves falling upwards