Café Crazy – poems – Francine Witte

Café Crazy
poems, Francine Witte
Kelsay Books, 2018

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…my sister lives alone in a house
that holds her like it’s a giant mouth
and she is just a word it wants to say. – {from} My Sister is Dying

I had this dream in which the person who sawed me in half also doubled as my audience. I asked two people what the dream might mean, and both said the same thing. By the time I’d forgotten what both had said, I had finished Francine Witte’s Café Crazy. My heart had stopped. A ghost, I’m sure of it, was trying on a dress. The dream was unreachable and what I made of my unpopulated presence was that loneliness disappears twice. Since then, I’ve turned backward through the pages of this book that I might unhear my memory of applause and be, again, handless in the spirit of another’s missed immediacies. Witte’s writings are psalms of a return that with campfire and ash tell the familiar of a more recognizable exile.

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reflection by Barton Smock

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book is here:
https://www.amazon.com/Cafe-Crazy-Francine-Witte/dp/1947465325