childhood

Garret Keizer

Garret Keizer is the author of The World Pushes Back, winner of the 2018 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and eight books of prose, including Getting Schooled, Privacy,and The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want. His poetry has appeared in AGNI, the Antioch Review, Harvard Review, the Hudson Review,the New Yorker, Ploughshares,and Raritan, among others.He is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives with his wife in northeastern Vermont.

 

 

Wendy Videlock

Wendy Videlock lives in a small agricultural town on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies. Her work appears in The Best American Poetry, American Life in Poetry, Hudson Review, Hopkins Review, the New York Times, Poetry, Dark Horse, and other venues. In the introduction to her first book, MacArthur finalist A.E. Stallings says of her work, “what [these poems] lack in length . . .

 

Face Down In History

Face Down In History

Then the gypsies abandoned their camp
and the stars sank down to candles.
All I could see was what could be
surmised from circumstance,
a dancing bear with a head scarf
and one gold earring climbing into a cab.
I was never so young again.
The banished Polish princess
who shared her orange
spit the seeds out on the floor.
She said rule number one was simple,
like the valley between her breasts.
There was no rule number two.

That Summer

That Summer

The roof burned continuously.
I passed long hours learning

the names of various shades of blue –
Air Force blue, cornflower blue,

Persian blue, periwinkle.
Night came early where I lived

with my mother and three brothers
and no one to read to me to sleep,

though the herd of clouds grazing
at the end of the street would always

lift their big, shaggy heads to listen.

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