Devil’s Lake

Fall 2011 Issue

Eduardo C. Corral: After Bei Dao/After Jean Valentine

The skin of your deity smells like gasoline

Your prayers are added to the pyre

A gold wheel spinning

Once your voice broke out in a sweat

Each word a salt lick

There are fingers rooting inside a violin

Orchestral maneuvers

In the middle of the pandemic

You mistook a group of ghosts for an orchard

You, coward

Fingers are rooting inside a violin to pull out

The last scraps of birdsong

A gold wheel spinning in your mind

Like insomnia

a photo of the author, Eduardo C. Corral EDUARDO C. CORRAL’s poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Jubilat, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. His work has been honored with a “Discovery”/The Nation award and residencies from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Slow Lightning, his first book of poems, was selected by Carl Phillips as the 2011 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. He is a recipient of a 2011 Whiting Writers’ Award. More from this issue >