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.
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.
