“The foam line of the lake breaks into ice.I can feel the weight of a flood, the granite of you sealing together. Still, the lake water is all quiet, no smellof rain. No sense of struggle or lungs folding…” –from “Auroras” which appears in the Spring 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 1) . . .
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“Barren field, tin sky, coudsthe color of clouds. Why describe thingswhen things describe themselves? Besides, there’s nowhere to turnwhen your shield against despairbecomes its source,” –from “Igloo” which appears in the Spring 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 1) Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve writtenI don’t remember the first . . .
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“On a Chilly January morning in 1893, Louise Imogen Guieny took the train from Auburndale to Boston and made her way with the brisk, long-legged steps of a practiced walker to 246 Boylston Street. When the poet entered the warmth of Perkins Hall, her gold-rimmed spectacles must have immediately fogged over. Yet . . .
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”BEITHE WAS A LOUD CITY. It had the loudness of a city not yet used to itself. Steel clicked against steel and stone echoed stone. There was no respite from its noise. On a bend in the road in the center of Beithe, there stood a house. It was known to all . . .
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“When I was eight years old, my mom invented a game called “getting lost.” She was worried, she later told me, that I was starting to feel less loved. At four and a half I’d drawn a chalk mural to welcome my new triplet siblings, but Mom feared that I’d grown to . . .
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“My love, The tide is poised. Between you and I the end of the world where an abandoned crane will either spit blueblazing desert from its graffiti lips or smashthe crow-bedecked tenements in search of a trumpet…“—from “The American Dream Writes to Orpheus” which appears in the Spring 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue . . .
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“On a recent list of top ten composers, my moody Chopindidn’t make the cut—the critic said he’d never truly lovedthe Romantic mode. It’s too personal, a biometric lock. Too magicianswallowing the handcuff key. The mystery of a list like this is lessof content than of order—I could tell you dark-horse Verdi here,hipster . . .
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“That morning, I had not exactly been spying on the Christian girl taking her bath outside in the strange area my father had rigged up for her, because though it had been permissible for him to get by the women of the house the idea of this young girl who lived with . . .
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“What will survive of us is love, or so Philip Larkin famously asserted — and believed no doubt since he’d never been to Boonville and, of course, never made the acquaintance of Rose and Edwin. Everybody in Boonville knew they hated each other, but there’s always a chance love conquered in the . . .
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“NINE YEARS AFTER my mother died, I saw her in Berlin. She was Turkish this time, religious too from the look of it so there was a headscarf. Her skin was slightly darker but it was her, no doubt. The same shocking blue eyes, almond at the edges, and the same huge . . .
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