The Banyan Review: Cathlin Noonan

Bio: 
Cathlin Noonan holds a Bachelor of Arts in Plan II Honors from the University of Texas at Austin. She currently lives in Missouri, where she works for the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. “A Drive, Twenty-Five Years On” and “Annunciation of a New Self” are her first published pieces, and she is honored to be in such great company.

A Drive, Twenty-Five Years On 

San Pedro Road grins a new city over buildings  we used up. I think about how decay can be foundation. 
How old teeth, after twenty years, grey against new crowns  but bricks laid first resist plank and linoleum and tile.     
I think our film, still cast on surfaces, shifts the new build on Blanco too —hands slapping vinyl booths in Jim’s Diner, Marlboro Red
tongue, uninvited, on tongue, fat, paused at a drive-thruin that black Camaro cliché, back seat, bucket seats
nicotine-calloused hands pushed upon but from below. I’ve seen mausoleums swallow other crypts, tipping 
across shying walls and wires, and I search for your name on Facebook, a desperate séance for someone dead sunk long before the formaldehyde of internet posts. Here’s another cliché I learned            addiction is 
a mistress, resented and trite even at sixteen. I learned another language lingers in the skin around lips, a twinkle, a tell.
But words were my first lover, shouldering steady views from the tops of Spanish-tiled roofs, so skin just peeled away. 
Now let San Antonio be my newborn cliché, a drive demanding knees to ground as words, cast as spittle across the floor, lay the decades’ grout. 

Annunciation of a New Self

I cleave myself from other selves                   in those first new days. Fragile fingers grasp                                    keys for an apartment in Queens for a first time. 
Alone I track unsteady steps through the hallway                  where padlocks    thick metal    swaddle other souls                                     to detangle without witness a self twined in weeds
in a post-war walkup. A decay between                walls off Northern Boulevard. With my dollar store broom                                    I sweep up loneliness, brittle as dried bark.
Collect scraps in a bowl on the entry                  hall dresser. Greet the smell of mulch with exhaust                                    in each evening’s unlocking. The kitchen, 
twitching lights and harlequin floors, ashtrays                  and cigarette smoke. Instead of soup, I stir paint                                     to seal dry rot of wood along walls and reclaim my sills. 
Afterwards in my oversized rocker, feet upon screens,                steadying between drags and cradled in muffled noise                                    from alley-side windows, I summon my next life from cracks
in the concrete. How I tilt and swell, knees                 to chest, below the panes of an open window and exhale.                                    My mother never taught me how to pray. At night,
alone on a hand-me-down bed clutched                 together with pegs and rope, I sculpt Virgin Mary                                     in the streetlight below the bedroom window, 
trace her silhouette between electrical wires, imagine                 a heart hammered with nails, strain to channel to that pulse                                    nectar from the swollen stings of my past. 
But when I say please, when I close my eyes    pleading                 I hear air — car horns, neighbor’s radio, a holler’s echo                                     between courtyard bricks — quivering, until dampened 
in the impossible slice of grass along sidewalk.

Cathlin Noonan

A Drive, Twenty-Five Years On

Annunciation of a New Self

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