Cole Depuy

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2021

Sense of Place

Nancy Kay Peterson

Enclose space and create a place. Divide a place and create multiple places. Example: small café in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. It’s been there for years. The place had two places. In one, people met for morning coffee, trashed the weather, talked about kids, the price of corn, ill health. They ate doughnuts and apple pie. After school, teenagers came for Cokes and french fries, talked about sports and watched who was with who. Harried parents, going home late, came in to carry out broasted chicken, fumbling with their wallets, joking with the cashier. In the other place within the place, cooks and dishwashers worked, complained, laughed, argued, commiserated over loves gone bad and car problems. Waitresses traveled from place to place through a space between. One day, they tore down all the walls and the places and the space between the places and it returned to the space it really was. Gone were the adults, the teenagers, the cooks, the dishwashers, the waitresses that traveled between the place’s places. Gone. All that remained was a small patch of green linoleum in the middle of an empty parking lot, exposed to space, defining loss.

Nancy Kay Peterson’s poetry has appeared in print and online in numerous publications, most recently in HerWords, Lost Lake Folk Opera, One Sentence Poems, Spank the Carp, Steam Ticket, Tipton Poetry Journal and Three Line Poetry. From 2004-2009, she coedited and co-published Main Channel Voices: A Dam Fine Literary Magazine (Winona, Minnesota). Finishing Line Press published her two poetry chapbooks, Belated Remembrance (2010) and Selling the Family (2021). For more information, see www.nancykaypeterson.com.

Reading Literary Theory in my Psychiatrist’s Parking Lot

Cole Depuy

My shrink is a bald man with circular spectacles & a Freudian S(l)ip coffee mug. He repeats, What are you not telling me? If he were a liberal humanist, he’d pull his chair up close & know what I was hiding;

a structuralist, he’d find where my life had lost balance & say, There it is!; a post-structuralist, he’d deny my repression & wholly claim it as his own; a modernist, he’d beg me not to tell him; I’d remain motionless. In the parking lot post-appointment, theories’ tentacles through my eyes are electricity cusping my brain. The $10 copay is the same price as a copy of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality with three months of Lexapro. I squint until the words become static. The trees rust at their edges, too. Mid-September: like serpent, like ember. The antidepressants mute my mind, erase my answer. What are you not telling me? [ ]

Cole Depuy, winner of the Negative Capability Press Spring 2020 Poetry Contest, is a Ph.D. student at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York & a recipient of the Provost’s Doctoral Summer Fellowship. His poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in The Summerset Review, Offing, Paterson Literary Review, Penn Review, Ilanot Review, & elsewhere. He is CoPoetry Editor for Harpur Palate & instructor for the Binghamton Poetry Project.