by CB Follett
Business has no apex.
On the curve of fortune,
all pinnacles are hindsight.
You don't know you've been there
until you hit the slippery downside
of the curve and look back up.
Success is a house of cards.
Layer on layer, each depending
on the other to hold taut.
Default one and the floors may come
tumblin' down.
Borrow, leverage, guarantee,
All paper courage.
We know our apex, seeing it
high now, above us. Back there.
Its shrinking pinpoint gleams in yesterday.
The cards are tumbling, turning
into torrents of water
from the cracked spillway. Rushing
down upon us. Sweeping
us away with the trunks and branches
of our possessions and hopes
taken in the flood,
in the lost footage of the torrent.
Winner of the 2001 National Poetry Book Award from Salmon Run Press, CB Follett has had poems published by Ploughshares, Alligator Juniper, Calyx, Americas Review, Peregrine, The Cumberland Review, Rain City Review, Ambit (England), The MacGuffin, Snowy Egret, Birmingham Poetry Review, New Letters Review, Psychological Perspectives, Without Halos, The Iowa Woman, Heaven Bone, Green Fuse, Black Bear Review, among others. She has been in many anthologies; received contest honors in the Billee Murray Denny, New Letters Prize, the Ann Stanford Prize, the Glimmer Train Poetry Contest and several contests from Poetry Society of America, among others. Five poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize plus three nominations as an individual poet. The most recent of her four collections of poetry is And Freddie Was My Darling, 2009. CB Follett is publisher/editor of Arctos Press, including the anthology, GRRRRR, A Collection of Poems About Bears; she was publisher and co-editor of RUNES, A Review of Poetry, 2001-to 2008.
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