This city's like a griddle.
Maybe one of those sky blues.
Decontextualized, it's chaos, but the poet finds a pattern -- abstract and concrete, personal, deep as language itself. The space debris orbiting between our ears.The Juror "knits" a lot in her hotel
room, through four middle "Sequestered" poems in the collection, weaving and
winding words with rondeaus, pantoums, sestinas, centos, and sonnets. Biding
time, not free, the Juror takes solace in these template forms you fill with
metaphor, little tension points. In her rondeau, her hotel room a kind of cell,
the Juror is
more grateful for the view
than for the king size mattress because you
don't sleep with any regularity
Instead, she looks out the window at the parking lot, noting the pattern of cars that come and go. "You fill your cell."
And on and on it goes with the others.
No talking allowed. No Googling. Just killing time, and doing time for it. In
her pantoum,
Anything goes once this godforsaken trial ends next month.
For now a juror must fold in on herselfuntil later.
(Which is exactly what a pantoum does; McClung's is poetry that suits the occasion.) One juror at a time in the pool. In her sestina, she reminds herself, "Now / you are forbidden from reading, forbidden from any talk / of this trial." How long will it take?
She remembers the OJ trial, "The OJ
jury in custody 265 days." She knits, and sits, and counts the cars, day and
night, notes plates, models, conjectures. And,
Now
you knit a sleeve, remember the Dream Team won,
OJ went free. Imagine the twelve that October Monday,
imagine their exhaustion, their bursting like volcanos to talk
at last, lift their voices again after so long.
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