The Clearing: Poems (Max Ritvo Poetry Prize) - Softcover

Adair, Allison

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1639550232 ISBN 13: 9781639550234

Verlag: Milkweed Editions, 2022

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Milkweed Editions

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Originally from central Pennsylvania, Allison Adair now lives in Boston, where she teaches at Boston College and GrubStreet. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Kenyon Review Online, North American Review, Threepenny Review, and ZYZZYVA, among other journals. Allison is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the Florida Review Editors’ Award, the Orlando Prize, and first place in Mid-American Review’s Fineline Competition. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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Angelus

Little mud shadow, hidden root,
only some of us know you were
here, ever a motion at all, a wave
before an arm, a seed just splitting
for the sprout. You lay coiled
a comma, a question, the soft
green berry of a potato that won’t
come true. I was a yellow stamen, then
a wheelbarrow full of empty sacks instead
of the ground you needed. You died
of thirst beneath the mass
of a basket. The painter understood
how to obscure and why
a prayer would be offered
to the brown earth and not to the ringing
of a brown sky. Dangers were everywhere:
a spire on the hill, pitchfork
digging for throb or pulse, we
were never safe. We were never
we, until Salvador, the man who bent time―
himself a closed eye, like you just
a part, a body’s outline and no more―
saw the surface wrinkle with ants
coming forward to feed. You were their
small picnic, buried under a layer of reeds
by hands folded in hope, or by the dark
clutch of a fresh-tilled hunger.

Silverton

It doesn’t matter who answers
the phone, it’s the same forecast:
snow following snow,
road closed followed by Jessie
returning to John, wrist healed
and you can hardly tell anything
went wrong, until she waves hello.
Or is it goodbye. You know, this much
cold, this high, batters the eye
until all it sees is warmth. The girls
lining up crayons before dinner.
Coals orange as a daffodil’s trumpet.
So easy to forget tomorrow’s ash.
In a ghost town, bowls of thin soup
steam on every edge. Nothing
can hurt us. The pioneers. We forget why
we came―but look at that mountain.
Was anything ever so new?

What We Should Really Be Afraid Of
I
Not snow.
Not a single flake
and not all of them at once.
Not their nest, their melting
puzzle, their instinct to insulate
against heat.

Not the storm, even hard, not when wind
discovers rain let its cool mouth linger
on the spine of a high mountain.
Not the mountain.
Not the smooth mud that reassures its slope:
it’s not your fault.

Not the thin white trees, leaning into weather
(they know what’s coming):
portents, gray steam created
and dissolved like
an apology dripping down
a bathroom mirror.
Not the writer’s hand
wiped on a leg.

Not spring, not another, not its vining
pleated limbs swollen with the ink of
a decomposing violet. Not the wasp
who shutters the hive of its compound eyes just
to live there, again, in that bloomy velvet―
reckless, forgiving, drunk with altitude.

Not the wasp’s slender waist.

II
Water in the stream below buzzes
with struggle – a woman’s hair
tangled in an anchor.
The thousand grasping hands of its rust
remind us: Pray that it holds.

There are things to fear.
You know it.
The water knows, too, the mountain,
the snow, even before it falls.
Boats, floating for a time,
wait for the sound of their narrow ribs
to crack. A fat speckled spider sharpens
in the shoe of someone you
need. Bacon grease naps in secret
cells.

III
A woman’s thumbs fumble a button.
Her organs shimmy at the wrong
time, she tells herself it’s
music. Someone else pulls a brush
through her daughter’s hair.
She decides she won’t hear
the steps in the hall, the key
turning in the lock.

He does it because he loves us.
You do it because you have to.
You do it because he told you.
We do it because we’re told to.
In an attic, a man steps on something soft
and tells himself the whole floor was covered
with dead birds, so how could he not?
But there was only one bird, lying just
where the man stepped. He knows.
Through his shoe,
he felt the long bones of the wing
give.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Milkweed Editions
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1639550232
• ISBN 13: 9781639550234
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 96
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar