Sharp Shadows

By ANNE PIERSON WIESE

This poem appears originally in Which Way Was North, published by Louisiana State University Press. Poet Anne Pierson Wiese will be a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2024. Register for this exciting celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.


On our kitchen wall at a certain time
of year appeared what we called the sharp
shadows. A slant of western light found
its way through the brown moult of fire
escape hanging on to our Brooklyn rental
building for dear life and etched replicas
of everything in its path—each bubble
and flaw in the blue glass, the blade
of every knife on the rack, the fine
hairs standing along the back of my arm.

I can’t remember which month, out of twelve,
they came, only that we were stunned fresh
every year to stumble upon such undying
perfection in our kitchen—or anywhere—
lives being dreams with the edges mostly blurred.

 

Anne Pierson Wiese‘s first poetry collection, Floating City (Louisiana State University Press) received the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award. Her second collection, Which Way Was North, was released in September 2023 (Louisiana State University Press). She has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the South Dakota Arts Council, and a Discovery/The Nation Poetry Prize. After an eight-year adventure in South Dakota, she and her husband, writer Ben Miller, have recently returned to live in New York City once again.  

Sharp Shadows

Related Posts

cover of HEIRLOOM

March 2025 Poetry Feature: Catherine-Esther Cowie’s Heirloom

CATHERINE-ESTHER COWIE
Her eye-less eye. My long / longings brighten, like tinsel, the three-fingered / hand. Ashen lip. To exist in fragments. / To exist at all. A comfort. / A gutting. String her up then, / figurine on the cot mobile. / And I am the restless infant transfixed.

Dispatches from Mullai Nilam, Marutha Nilam, and Neithal Nilam

VIJAYALAKSHMI
There is fire everywhere, / both inside and outside. / Unaware of the intensity of the fire, / they maintain silence / like the serenity of a corpse. / From the burning fire / bursts out a waterfall tainted in red. / All over the shores have bloomed / the flaming lilies of motherhood.

Gray Davidson Carroll's headshot next to the cover of The Common Issue 28.

Podcast: Gray Davidson Carroll on “Silent Spring”

GRAY DAVIDSON CARROLL
Poet Gray Davidson Carroll speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about their poem “Silent Spring,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Gray talks about poetry as a way to witness and observe the world and how we experience it, and how it’s changing.