David Roderick’s second collection, The Americans, was published as part of the Pitt Poetry Series in 2014. His first book, Blue Colonial, won the APR/Honickman Prize and was published jointly by The American Poetry Review and Copper Canyon Press in 2006. He teaches in the MFA writing program at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
I want to know the world by feeling how it moves, as it’s too late for crawling or learning new lines or reaching for sex. For many years I had dreams in which wings grew into my shoulders, but when I grabbed for food I starved, and when I tried to rape or make nest, […]
Must you tremble when cars trap shadows, or when the neighbor’s apricots, terribly bitter, fall on the lawn at night? Like the vine and the trellis I want to hug you from behind the way a friend surprises a friend. Awake beneath my bedspread, the stars’ crooked branches, I also need the calm of a […]
Birds graze the tassels, sparrowing actually, or mocking, their colors worth nothing unless I pin their wings in the field. Speaking of fields: the Russians say life is a walk across an open one where mules are buried, and men. The soil remembers a forest that marched right through. In time-lapse. In the filtered light […]
Can’t I make something of her bed, our sleep, and the white seam opening between us, our shared afternoons in the rendition house where nursing ended and trying-to-be-perfect began, when I was swept into forbiddance, then tucked down, her body my lean-to after an hour of knitting (in which her voice vibrated accordingly), not long […]
Loot my point of view, hove my heart free from its hived booth though I know your smoke, its black blossom, is a substance I’ll never become: colors of plaster and grass I’ve prepped flawlessly, rivers I’ve whittled thin. It’s a personal matter to me, the wind. But let it be our cathedral feeling: a […]
I’m not interested in sadness, just a yard as elder earth, a library of sunflowers battered by the night’s rain. When sliced wide, halved at dawn, I see how you exist, O satellite town, your bright possibility born again in drywall and the diary with the trick lock. Hardly held, for years I slept with […]
In flowerbeds we crowd, some praying, some bowing as the world, minute as it is, stays in motion: box stores doing business, fast food joints, and above us a crow, secular bird, lighting on a lamppost while we take pictures or cry as if we could live forever in this gloried surround, gazing up at […]