Afterwards everything whitened
like paper or breath—
The room was suddenly anchored to itself,
the chains stopped groaning.
I knew I could not leave with you.
The sea outside was like the sea
on the map. A sea-god was blowing
into a crosshatched arc of sails.
Richie Hofmann is the recipient of a 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. His poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares, among other journals.
CARLIE HOFFMAN
I know it’s October because I wear / shoes without socks. The air is good / to me & I sweat less through my shirts. / Entire days of trees on campus, of stray geese / crowding the grass near the traffic / circle like groupies, as if / the honking cars were a rock band.
HANNAH JANSEN
At the laundromat the whir of machines, / whorled & busy, the pleasure & difficulty / of stillness Waiting, sockless, I aspire to be / the cross-legged woman reading a magazine, / settled into her corner of time I like her gray braid, / the way her skin sings.
MARÍA NEGRONI
No—posthumous—inquiry will manage—never—to see what I wrote. What I lost each time—to / discover what a home is: stiff body inside the openness it has created. No one will know how / much I insisted, how much I demanded—and with no defenses.
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