paper • 64 pages • 14.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-884800-77-1
Winner of the 2005 Levis Poetry Prize
selected by Henri Cole
ON YOUR BRILLIANT ESCAPE
In the city of the made-up city,
you can watch them meet.
Desire in the backyard.
Desire down the lane. Wallowing.
You can press
your enormous eye
to their window, and see them
taking it up,
becoming little red birds.
And you can demand they hear you,
there at the light switch,
a fist the size of the opera house.
I’m small. I fall soft,
they could say.
I’m lovely. I know you.
“In these poems of houses and yards and little roads, things are quietly disintegrating. And the men and women are always rushing toward a future, where the sky is gray and voices are going too fast to understand, but, if you look for it, a redbud is shimmering on the lawn.” — Henri Cole, judge