Lace Curtain You Drape Over Every Mirror

By VALERIE DUFF

Keep that smile
barbed, the wire
the horse leans against.

Birds crack seeds
on the other side of your glass
door. The body, blind, curves

its hedge down paths.
Time’s narrow microscope.
A clump of cells, narrow threader

juking the ground,
reverberates.
They say it’s gone.

It’s gone.
Everyone’s hands
shifting you gently,

no knowing
not knowing (you know
that now),

their silent nods,
stonecutter precision,
your plea for the tool.

 

[Purchase Issue 18 here.]

 

Valerie Duff’s second book of poems will be published by Salmon Poetry in 2021. Her first book, To the New World, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize in 2011. Her poems and book reviews have appeared in The Common, POETRY, Salamander, The Boston Globe, PN Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor to The Critical Flame.

Lace Curtain You Drape Over Every Mirror

Related Posts

Glass: Five Sonnets

MONIKA CASSEL
In ’87 I see guardsmen walk their AK-47s / on the platforms. The trains slow down but never stop. I think, / my mother was born in such a different Germany, but this is true for everyone / —so why can’t I stop looking?

cover of "Civilians"

On Civilians: Victoria Kelly Interviews Jehanne Dubrow

JEHANNE DUBROW
Now we live in North Texas, hours away from the nearest shore. And yet, the massive amounts of open space—all the prairie, marsh, and plains that we have here—started to feel like another kind of vast water, another great expanse of distance and isolation.

Lizard perched on a piece of wood.

Poems in Tutunakú and Spanish by Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez

CRUZ ALEJANDRA LUCAS JUÁREZ
Before learning to walk / and before I’d fallen upon the wet earth / already my heart hummed in three tones. / Even when my steps were still clumsy, / I already held three consciousnesses. // Long before my baptism, / already my three nahuals were running