Deborah Ager’s first book, Midnight Voices (WordTech), was published in 2009. Her poems appear in New England Review, The Georgia Review, Quarterly West, Birmingham Poetry Review, and New South. She’s received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the West Chester Poetry Conference, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and […]
after Neruda’s “Disasters” In Florida, it was raining ash because the fire demanded it. I had to point my car landward and hope the smoke would part, but it was a grey sea absorbing my body. Cabbage palms were annihilated. Even the Indian River steamed. Black stalks stank. The condominiums […]
I believe we commit errors we want no one to know about, that we wish we could bathe and be healed and sip whisky and be clean. And when the bitter drink hits my tongue—after that first sting— the first memory returns— my throat swollen nearly shut with a virus, […]
–Tampa, 1942 If they liked mangos, we’d have none, mama says. We move yard to yard. We squat and bend to pick up fruit. She slides her full hand deep into the sack to keep the fruit from bruising. I see a curtain move in the house and wish for better clothes. My dress has […]