The Ark
This place is an ark now.Behave as you would on an ark.I said these things to the manas soon as he got home.The man looked at meand then he looked at our home.He said he did not knowhow he would behave on an ark.I asked him to please relaxand as an example I relaxedby allowing my body to rockslightly with the waves.When I opened my eyesI saw he had followed my leadbut then had surpassed me.He was more of a wave than a man nowwhich I found insulting.Stop it I said. You are going to sink us.He kept sloshing. It was vulgar.He said now you are my fish.
Feature Date
- June 7, 2020
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Copyright © 2019 by Heather Christle
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Christopher DeWeese
Heather Christle is author of the poetry collections The Difficult Farm (2009); The Trees The Trees (2011), which won the Believer Poetry Award; What Is Amazing (2012); and Heliopause (2015). Her first work of nonfiction, The Crying Book, was released in November 2019. A former creative writing fellow in poetry at Emory University, Christle’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, and many other journals. She was born in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, and earned a BA from Tufts University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has taught at Wittenberg University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Guelph, and other institutions. She lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
101
Seattle, Washington
Center for Religious Humanism
Seattle Pacific University
Editor in Chief
James K.A. Smith
Poetry Editor
Shane McCrae
Founding Editor
Gregory Wolfe
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