Abstraction
Isn’t it hard to see light’s bearing
against the wall? The animals know where heat
is going. All I care about is holding a story
in my hands. The square, the smell,
the movement. When I fly my throat into a morning,
the lint molts off in ceaseless presents. No witch,
no word, that’s how dull the smoke was, two stories
up, holding my head above my foot. Isn’t saying
Now hard? The after of the stain
becomes juice, or medicine, and the sun is like the sun
in a movie, how it slants across the bed.
Copyright © 2025 by Anne Marie Rooney. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 3, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I’ve been puzzling over what to say about a poem called ‘Abstraction,’ so here are some concretes: My computer tells me I began it in 2018, early in my living in Baltimore. I have clipped and clipped at it since then. Today, it is one of a series of ‘Abstractions’ in my new manuscript, Spidering, which asks questions about representation, disembodiment, and gender. Also, when does the box of a story—a painting, a sonnet, a name—limit, and when does it free? Can it do both? What do I tell, and what do I obscure? (Still, always, I come back to the body.)”
—Anne Marie Rooney
Anne Marie Rooney
Anne Marie Rooney is a poet and artist. She is the author of No Beautiful (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2018) and Spitshine (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012), as well as two chapbooks. With artist and game designer Sam Sheffield, Rooney creates poetic games under the pseudonym “Lorraine.” She also hosts Poem on the Radio, a biweekly discussion of a single poem, on Central Vermont Community Radio WGDR’s program Still Life with Club Soda. Since 2010, Rooney has been collaborating with painter Julia Rooney, using the U.S.