Two Harbors
When I started to talk to myself againIt was a good thingBecause I'm fascinating:I know what I like to hear and when.It happened when I got out of bed,Wobbly from trazodone,Looking for my phone.Only the dogs heard what I said.This brought back the hell of July,When I hiked every chanceI got, talked to plantsAnd deer. I didn't want to die.Silence. Life's an audition, you see.As I make my bed,Take another med,I repeat what I said: "Will it be me?"This cove and that eucalyptus tree,Buffaloes, a herd of three,Help me fit my soliloquyTo the undefeated affect of the sea.
Feature Date
- June 5, 2020
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Copyright © 2019 by Rex Wilder
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Kara McFarlane
A student of William Meredith and Joseph Brodsky among others, Rex Wilder has long been a lover of form. Jamaica Baldwin, an editor on his most recent book, Open Late: New and Collected Poems (Chatwin Books), says “In his ideal world there is a rhyme for everything, a response for every call.”
He is also the author of Boomerangs in the Living Room and Waking Bodies (both Red Hen Press). His poems have appeared or are upcoming in Poetry, London’s Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Ireland, The New Criterion, and The Yale Review, as well as Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond.
Wilder’s poem “Canal Nocturne” has been selected for the new Knopf anthology, Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic, whose publication date is this coming June 9.
Spring 2019
Yellow Springs, Ohio
Editor
Robert S. Fogarty
Poetry Editor
Judith Hall
The Antioch Review, a small independent literary magazine founded in 1941 in a small town in the cornfields of Ohio, is one of the oldest, continuously publishing literary magazines in America. Publishing essays, fiction, and poetry from promising and prominent authors, the Antioch Review has an international readership and reputation of publishing the “best words in the best order” for over 75 years.
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