CLIFFS
Words are afraid up here.
The rapture and the terrifying exposure.
Strange birds roosting, a human voice shouting a world’s-end shout.
Snow hurries to the meeting, wanting to cover the waking in my body.
I could fill up the sea with this waking.
The outlook is thrilling; it satisfies.
It goes even farther than the view from the heights of love.
It eats the roof off the sky.
My radiant loneliness, imagining me under ruin of starlight.
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Sandra Lim is the author of Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). Her work has appeared in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, American Letters & Commentary, and other journals. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.