Christian Barter at Bowdoin College
Christian Barter recorded live at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, May 4, 2006.
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Crazy Jane Meets a Bear
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” she says when she finally meets him. She has been chasing the bear, but the bear is smart. He kneels down to brush over his tracks with the soft branch of a fir. He catches a hint of her scent, and is gone. It’s not that he’s afraid of […]
Sand
I have a tone inside me that has not been sounded. Or only once or twice. Once she went straight to the center of me, once she could have walked through me like a tunnel. She could have seen sky on the other side of me. I could have washed my hands in sand, then […]
In Arabic
In her room in my house, a teenage girl speaks a language I don’t understand, a language she makes into gravel to fling at her father, across a thousand miles. Like a mood ring set on a stove, she changes when she hears her father’s voice–the atmosphere around her turns dark purple, spiked with yellow-green […]
Blizzard
I’d allowed myself to thirst and thirst, and when I drank from the cup of her body, the snow began to fall in flakes as big as feathers, hushing the streets, covering cars. It drew neighbors out to push snow from one another’s trees where branches hung loaded, and the limbs, suddenly freed, sprung toward […]
The Moment
In those days, Betty Crocker always called for sifted flour, and so in homes across America, women sifted. When my mother’s mother turned the wobbly red knob, hulls and stones jumped in the wire basket, but by my mother’s time the flour was fine— now women sifted to achieve precision, purity, perfection. It made the […]
Train Whistle
I wake up to my lover on the phone, singing his repertoire of train songs. He does an impressive train whistle, mixing it liberally into every song. His favorite is the one his father sang, about not using the bathroom while the train is in the station. It’s set to the tune of the Humoresque, […]