Solomon didn’t know what to doShould he cut the baby in half
length-wise or sidewise?Each mum have an arm and a leg
or arms to one, legs to another?Hearts can be broken in different waysThink of him,
coming to the bath,
having to fill it
with his own spitNot knowing what to do
until his work was done for himAnd then he was off the hook,
a very large hook of the kind
they hang sides of beef from
in a refrigerated roomAfterwards, alone in his library
see how he wraps the broken spines
so carefully
each text will be called upon
to comfort another
Solomon
Mary Ruefle
Feature Date
- October 9, 2018
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Copyright © 2018 by Mary Ruefle
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
Mary Ruefle is the author of My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.
Volume 52, Number 3 / 2018
Denver, Colorado
University of Denver
Editor
W. Scott Howard
Associate Editor
Stella Corso
Managing Editor
Lucien Darjeun Meadows
Poetry Editors
George Kovalenko
Wendy Chen
Cover Art
Zoe Hawk, The Stairway, 2020.
Oil on panel, 24 x 24 inches.
2015 marked 50 years of the Denver Quarterly.
Here are 50 of the many, many amazing writers, past and present, whose work has appeared in our pages...
Diane Ackerman, John Ashbery, Paul Auster, Mary Jo Bang, Roland Barthes (trans. Annette Lavers), Eula Biss, Maurice Blanchot (trans. Patrick Bowles), Gerald Chapman, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Joan Didion, Rikki Ducornet, Percival Everett, Forrest Gander, Dana Gioia, Jorie Graham, Lily Hoang, Edmond Jabès (trans. Rosmarie Waldrop), Siel Ju, Frank Kermode, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Siwar Masannat, Harry Mathews, Farid Matuk, Cris Mazza, Shane McCrae, Fred Moten, Es'kia Mphahlele, Joyce Carol Oates, Simon Ortiz, Camille Rankine, Martha Ronk, Jacques Roubaud (trans. Harriet Zinnes), Tomaž Šalamun, Christine Schutt, Anis Shivani, Gary Soto, Susan Steinberg, James Tate, Deb Olin Unferth, Lee Upton, César Vallejo (trans. Clayton Eshleman with Jorge Guzmán), Gerald Vizenor, Ocean Vuong, Anne Waldman, Robert Penn Warren, Diane Williams, John Williams, Tyrone Williams, Sara June Woods, C.D. Wright.
And there is so much more to come.
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