History
Anything worse can you imagine the stinkof floodwater children chasing each otherfor a game through green squelchingpesticide grass dragonflies not ever even once closingtheir mineral eyes history occurs at the cellular levelthis or that wet gate thrown opena parade of kinked or otherwise kinked proteinsshuffling down through the centuriessuch that your thrice great-grandmother every peckof sour barley & shame yet haunts your RNA I’m seriousI blame the hard Finnish winter of 1863for over by the creaky swings the skater boys huffing spicethe exclusion acts for the neighbor woman we never seeone night hauled out beneath the whitest sheet& this morning when into bed with us my six-year-old sonslides his small perfect body I’m thinking twenty thirty forty years hencethe wet messages even now assembling falling through arterioles & bonesI’m thinking last night of him not going to bed not going to bed not not notI ripped off his blankets blazed the lights nearly shatteredthe damn window flinging it up in its frame you want to stay up all nightfine all right are you all right I ask this rain-dark morning& in answer he snuggles up against me his allotment of lying bloodjust two skins from mine
Feature Date
- January 28, 2020
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Copyright © 2019 by Joe Wilkins
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Joe Wilkins is the author of four books of poetry, including Thieve (2020), winner of the Blue Lynx Prize, and When We Were Birds (2016), winner of the Oregon Book Award in Poetry. Wilkins’s debut novel, Fall Back Down When I Die (2019), shortlisted for the Center For Fiction’s First Novel Award, was praised as “remarkable and unforgettable” in a starred review at Booklist, and his memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers (2012), won the GLCA New Writers Award in Creative Nonfiction. Wilkins lives with his family in western Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield College.
Summer 2019
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Louisiana State University
Co-Editor & Poetry Editor
Jessica Faust
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