SECURITY OF THE FIRST WORLD
But alone. Other
possibilities perhaps
and even if I am
of two sliding partitions:
the trees’ spacing, tidal
flats punctured by tubular
posts, children—I cannot
arrive at such days,
a fly bumping glass.
Faces may take me
to a station to pick out
hands from stacks of hands.
I continue meaning work
on the metal up into
palatial sound, bricking
a total music of the past.
Water, yes. Include
the hacking text as an excellent
first step, and a flying
picture slashing in ether
flashing a short-lived
shadow. In fact she worked
every day, wedged
between moments of thinking
new cities and a glass bird
furred in monosyllables
no one had bothered
to adopt. She did not
die. A truck came
collecting things and climbing
into the back she entered
a crushingly red sea.
Shane Book’s first collection, Ceiling of Sticks, won the 2009 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the 2012 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and was a 2011 Poetry Society of America “New American Poet” Selection. He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines in the U.S., U.K., and Canada—and on film. He has received scholarships to the MacDowell Colony, Brazil’s Sacatar Foundation, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program and Cave Canem. His honors include a New York Times Fellowship in Poetry, Fellowships to the Flaherty Film Seminar and the Telluride Film Festival, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a National Magazine Award.