how was the snowAs if the snow were a province I’d visited,not a season come down upon me. As ifhe’d never stood on the ridge and watchedthe whole cloth of it blow inover the lake,blank and bridal.Any mark I’d made on the earth, it annulled:the dropped map, the poor footprints of children,the felts I pulled from their boots hoping they’d dryby morning. The snow was a fieldI woke in. Here are the driftsof my ribs for proof, here is my heartgone to windbreak. Brother, I am tiredof living bone-bound and uphill, of rolling through stopsto keep from getting stuck.The snow was irrevocable, songless.A relic. The ruinsof the wood.I made my way homeby ditch and by deadfall,all night laid awake in the stormlistening for the scrapeof the plow gone by, waitingfor the blade and my bodyto change the snow’s tensefrom falling and fallingto fell.
Elegy Beginning with a Text from My Brother
Feature Date
- April 3, 2019
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“From If the house by Molly Spencer. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2019 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved. Originally from The Georgia Review, Volume LXXII, No. 3&4 (Fall/Winter 2018).”
Molly Spencer has recently published poetry in FIELD, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares,, and her debut collection, If the house, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Fall 2019. Spencer’s critical writing has appeared in the Colorado Review, the Kenyon Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy and is poetry editor at The Rumpus.
Fall 2018
Atlanta, Georgia
University of Georgia
Editor
Gerald Maa
Managing Editor
C. J. Bartunek
Founded at the University of Georgia in 1947 and published there ever since, The Georgia Review has become one of America’s most highly regarded journals of arts and letters. Each quarterly issue offers a diverse, thoughtfully orchestrated gathering of short stories, general-interest essays, poems, reviews, and visual art.
Never stuffy and never shallow, The Georgia Review seeks a broad audience of intellectually open and curious readers—and strives to give those readers rich content that invites and sustains repeated attention and consideration. The physical journal is made to last, expertly printed on fine paper and perfect bound for durability and ease of shelving in one’s library, and the content is made to last as well: over the years, many subscribers have told us that The Georgia Review’s offerings prompt them not only to read every issue cover to cover but also to return to those issues and to share them with friends and colleagues.
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