Love, I Am

Elizabeth Jacobson

All day this thoughthad me reeling—did not vanishand then return—was persistentlike a ceilingleak pinging into tin.Opaque rain all day—what am Ito myself:Two feet onsome landwhen upright;a backbone with brancheswhen supine? Thoughtsbecomeweary—and merely announcelinearity. Love,I amso wary of thishappiness, whenit floods in—whenit tumbles to a halt—a rough-cut rubyat the center of a silver bowl.Rain is the loneliest color,then lake, then shade.

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APR June 2023

Elizabeth Jacobson was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Laureate Fellow. Her most recent book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch, (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019), and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. Her other books include Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books, 2012), two chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press, Are the Children Make Believe? and A Brown Stone, and Everything Feels Recent When You’re Far Away, Poetry and Art from Santa Fe Youth During the Pandemic (Axle Books, 2021), which she co-edited. Her work has been published in many literary journals including the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Plume, On the Seawall, the Los Angeles Review, and her community projects have received eight consecutive grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. Elizabeth is a reviews editor for the on-line magazine Terrain.org, and she teaches poetry workshops regularly in Santa Fe, often in partnership with the Center for Contemporary Arts and the public library.

May/June 2023

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Editor
Elizabeth Scanlon

The American Poetry Review is dedicated to reaching a worldwide audience with a diverse array of the best contemporary poetry and literary prose. APR also aims to expand the audience interested in poetry and literature, and to provide authors, especially poets, with a far-reaching forum in which to present their work.

APR has continued uninterrupted publication of The American Poetry Review since 1972, and has included the work of over 1,500 writers, among whom there are nine Nobel Prize laureates and thirty-three Pulitzer Prize winners.

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