Anne Shaw is the author of two collections, Undertow (2007), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize from Persea Books, and Dido in Winter (Persea, 2014). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including New American Writing, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Gulf Coast, New Ohio Review, and Subtropics. A recipient of a Gertrude Stein Award from Green Integer Press and a finalist […]
Go to the window. Count the birds. How many seagulls are there? How many cries? You must work hard. Like this. Like this. The single musical phrase practiced over and over. The work is intricate he said, running his fingers over the carved green wood. Sometimes it was iron, sometimes tin. Tin squares on the […]
In the river of my dream I’m ankle-deep in the water’s muddy froth, my cuffs rolled up. A manatee or alligator swims at me and rises, hugely brown. It’s the size of a submarine with dull, enormous eyes. You call it hell dog and begin to flee. The narrator of the dream informs: The hell […]
The pink troll of our decade snickers from under its bridge as the country goes crazy for jesus and the grey men in the alley start to stink. I am humming under my breath in the key of doubt as you pray to the god of washrooms, make us clean. Each day’s bitter ribbon and […]
Thailand, 2005 If not for the ship’s hull liquoring light, the day’s bent edge, the arc of a traitorous thought, if not for thresh and thrash in my blood like a thousand bells, then anise and white silk would lay us down, then we would lick the scene as a tomcat preens its belly, static-struck […]
Before the day grows hot, she wakes to the drone of bees. She fastens the braid of her leaving, hooks her shadow back to the wall like a coat. She counts the pieces of dreams: ten black birds and a coin. Coastline where a blue house waits with its rooms like hearts. Now when she […]
For Anne Porter Driven for once below deck, I watch as the snow spins down, squint at pines in the distance: the thaw is a long way off. A little smoke leaks from the houses. The water fills with snow. The cabin smells of diesel fuel and wool. These, then, are the islands from which […]
Bison, limned in charcoal, die across the rocks. Reindeer float in ochre on the walls. Overhead, soot rings the opening; the river froze, careening into cold. Then, as now, the moon spun through the trees. The people watched, with sorrow in their bones and night stretched long. The pressure of a mouth, the thumb-smudge tracked […]