POETS’ CORNER: BRIDGER ON THE “SILVER SCREEN”

15 May POETS’ CORNER: BRIDGER ON THE “SILVER SCREEN”

Editor’s note: Kierstin Bridger is the 2011 winner of Telluride Arts’ Mark Fischer Poetry Prize and a regular contributor to Telluride Inside… and Out She joins our family of wonderful writers/poets, among them, Word Woman Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, “Feelosophy” major David Feela, and Denver-based writer Mark Stevens.

Silver Screen

Flick of cigarette
the theatre is burning
Inside celluloid films
rehash plot lines
while the hungry maw of flame
consumes it’s silent stars

Temperature rises to meet the huntress
A miner’s daughter turned diva,
coal lined stare and rosebud sulk

A hungry sharecropper’s son in spats
shiny shoes tapping like hell
clap stepping through searing blue flame

Under a full moon, and searing heat
crowds of peanut noshing townies,
watch their passion smolder

As spark engulfs rhinestone, forsaken
flasks seep white lightning through seats,
dissolve in steam slowly
grey ash compounds with mining silt;
fresh argentine for a looming
ghost town

This is the American vision, as real as the reel
igniting the projector’s box
It is the grit baby cakes, the powdery grit
and sometimes, even out west,
smoke gets in your eyes