Escape Velocity

By Bonnie Arning

From the moment of a marriage’s heated inception to its period of luminous crowding and onward into distance and darkness, Bonnie Arning’s Escape Velocity asks if it’s possible to exist outside the only universe we’ve ever known. In modes both lyric and narrative, we are given a peephole into the height and decline of a marriage that begins beneath the moving lights of Las Vegas, Nevada, and traverses the devastating terrain of gambling, miscarriage, infidelity, and violence.

Arning gives voice to divergent aspects of love and violence through her use of math problems, erasures, dictionary entries, structured stanzas, and sprawling free verse. This multiplicity of forms comes together to explore everything from pop culture references of domestic violence to cultural notions of victims and victimhood. However dark, collectively these poems tell a love story—an acceptance of our capability to love those who hurt us, but also the love-of-self required to slowly and steadily reach "the velocity to be everleaving."

In the tradition of Eavan Boland and Louise Glück, Arning wrestles down and examines the terrible without flinching. We journey with her, engrossed by each difficult truth: a precipice near which we are both terrified to stand and transfixed by its unnerving insistence on beauty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Release date: Feb 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781885635563

Book preview

The Mountain West Poetry Series

Stephanie G’Schwind & Donald Revell, series editors

We Are Starved, by Joshua Kryah

The City She Was, by Carmen Giménez Smith

Upper Level Disturbances, by Kevin Goodan

The Two Standards, by Heather Winterer

Blue Heron, by Elizabeth Robinson

Hungry Moon, by Henrietta Goodman

The Logan Notebooks, by Rebecca Lindenberg

Songs, by Derek Henderson

The Verging Cities, by Natalie Scenters-Zapico

A Lamp Brighter than Foxfire, by Andrew S. Nicholson

House of Sugar, House of Stone, by Emily Pérez

&luckier, by Christopher J Johnson

Escape Velocity, by Bonnie Arning

ESCAPE VELOCITY

POEMS

BONNIE ARNING

The Center for Literary Publishing

Colorado State University

Copyright © 2017 by Bonnie Arning

All rights reserved.

For information about permission to reproduce

selections from this book, write to

The Center for Literary Publishing

attn: Permissions

9105 Campus Delivery, Colorado State University

Fort Collins, Colorado 80523-9105.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Arning, Bonnie, author.

Title: Escape velocity : poems / Bonnie Arning.

Other titles: Mountain west poetry series.

Description: Fort Collins, Colorado : The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, [2017] | Series: The mountain west poetry series

Identifiers: LCCN 2016050021 (print) | LCCN 2016051382 (ebook) | ISBN 9781885635556 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781885635563 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Marriage--Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS3601.R5824 A6 2017 (print) | LCC PS3601.R5824 (ebook) |

   DDC 811/.6--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050021

The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

1  2  3  4  5     21  20  19  18  17

Arlo,

More than the universe,

which though unbounded

is finite, infinity is not

a quantity. Infinity is

all there is: I love you

like that.

How easy to ignore the shifting of stars

when the self seems its own astronomical body.

CONTENTS

I.

Marriage Ephemera

The night Saddam Hussein died we were drunk

Las Vegas Strip, 4 a.m.

On all the nights he leaves me, a spider crawls into my head,

Escape Fallacy

Stand Burn

Tight Spaces

Clark County Reveal

Pearl

II.

Lost Body

While paying for lunch I found his wedding ring

The Fish

First Summer

Knit Tight

The Science of Sight

Model Victim

Calculus of Violent Behavior

Taking the Moon, Burning It Down

III.

Siren Song

Bleeding, Love

Victim Mentality

Five