Kyle McCord & Jeannie Hoag: I Wait to Send Myself Home
A birth into another
precise word
lavender, crocus
we don’t know
each other, voices
through walls
wall of wind, wall of
mind, me from
me, across the
river is a corresponding
solution, this mathematics
of continuing
as if the same
Self Seen as Art 1
The grass is many baubles
stacked against each other,
and today you will not leave the beloved.
You will see a man,
your friend, wearing his Amish hat,
his grey suit, pointing to a lot
where a president’s mother gave birth.
The laundry rapping blindly
against the air. The leaves
burgeoned brown.
Is this pump-handle hose,
this perfect terrace of opals
worth missing this shadow
bled lovely onto the lawn?
Tell it to the marrionette shades,
Charon, and the children—
not pictured here—lounging
in the gangling, arboreal arms.
Tell it to me when I have begun
the end of my bloom,
wilt into water, ask to thirst.
Put on my Sunday shoes.
Tell it to me as I tell it to you:
my finger in the air.
The chickens, I point.
The pregnant barn
dampening the lamplight.
KYLE McCORD’s Galley of the Beloved in Torment was the winner of the 2008 Orphic Prize and was released by Dream Horse Press in spring 2010. He has work forthcoming or published fromBoston Review, Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, Painted Bride Quarterly, and elsewhere.
JEANNIE HOAG’s as-yet unnamed chapbook is forthcoming from Agnes Fox Press. Her work is forthcoming or published from NOO Journal, Invisible Ear, and Seeing Other People. She served as managing editor for Slope Editions and now works at the Poetry Collection at the University of Buffalo.