Light snow, bare branches.
It’s easier now to see
Deep into the woods,
Loss upon loss settling
Under a lattice of ice.
Phillis Levin is the author of six poetry collections, including An Anthology of Rain and Mr. Memory & Other Poems, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet.
I know you think that evil always fades
like grass, that even when it spreads itself
like a bay tree, or cobwebs on a shelf,
time will turn it back, as sun with shade,
Amherst College’s tenth annual literary festival runs from Thursday, February 27 to Sunday, March 2. Among the guests is PAISLEY REKDAL, whose book West: A Translation was longlisted for the National Book Award. The Common is pleased to reprint a short selection of video poems from West here.
Join Paisley Rekdal and Brandom Som in conversation with host Ruth Dickey, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, on Sunday, March 2 at 2pm.
Register and see the full list of LitFest events here.
Not
The houses are photographed with light in mind:
The sun, they say, is shining here. The filter
hints at lemons: fresh laundry on a quaint
old line. The “den” becomes the “family room”
where we’d play rummy and watch TV, the square
footage enough to hold all of our misgivings.
By ANGIE MACRI
Danger, as in strangers, men or women;
as in twisters at night when you couldn’t
see them coming; as in the machines
that made work so easy you forgot
to watch what you were doing,
Maryland, 2020
My partner wears the panopticon,
and I carry the rope. Hungry
for the rush, the chase, we locate
the missing black calf
about two-tenths of a mile
from East Silver Spring.
He’s wearing a long-sleeve
jersey T-shirt, navy blue jeans.
We are stretching towards each other,
words tangling. The words can’t always
be torn apart. Sometimes you
are ти. Sometimes we touch.
By TREY MOODY
My grandmother likes to tell me dogs
understand everything you say, they just can’t
say anything back. We’re eating spaghetti
while I visit from far away. My grandmother
just turned ninety-four and tells me dogs
understand everything you say, they just can’t
and Ida B. Wells, well, frustrated
the engenderment of the official record;
crisscrossed the country interviewing
poplars that had been accessories to atrocities,
Morning wind speaks a dialect of smoke,
brings news from yesterday and tomorrow:
what’s burning there will soon enough burn here.
One bullet. Even a rumor of bullet
restless in the chamber of a neighbor’s gun.
To run, before he arrives with his god.
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