哀 / Sad
From West: A Translation (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) by Paisley Rekdal. Copyright © 2023 by Paisley Rekdal. Used with the permission of the publisher.
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Bats
unveil themselves in dark. They hang, each a jagged, silken sleeve, from moonlit rafters bright as polished knives. They swim the muddled air and keen like supersonic babies, the sound we imagine empty wombs might make in women who can’t fill them up. A clasp, a scratch, a sigh. They drink fruit dry. And wheel, against feverish light flung hard upon their faces, in circles that nauseate. Imagine one at breast or neck, Patterning a name in driblets of iodine that spatter your skin stars. They flutter, shake like mystics. They materialize.
2007
Wild Horses
Seraph Young Ford, Maryland, 1887
First woman to vote in Utah and the modern nation, February 14, 1870.
2020
Once
white field. And the dog
dashing past me
into the blank,
toward the nothing.
Or:
not running anymore but
this idea of him, still
in his gold
fur, being
2019