Emily Warn is the author of The Leaf Path (1982) and The Novice Insomniac (1996), both from Copper Canyon Press. Her new collection, Shadow Architect, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2008. Her poems and essays appear in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Blackbird, BookForum, The Bloomsbury Review, and The Writer's Almanac. Warn taught creative writing at Lynchburg College, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, […]
I wake in a strange room in a strange city delivering a funeral oration or a lecture about rain. All day the dream bobs into view, sinks. What combination of blown leaf and jangled light starts it talking? If I could write down its instructions, I could fall inlove, find meaningful work. Outside, rain drills […]
In her kitchen, she holds night in a box. Inside, the moon drifts and catches on shred of clouds. The clouds catch and slip through trees. In their bed, sleepers do not count the hours she holds them on her lap. At four, wind. At five, moon sets in hills. Sleepers scurry into cupboards. In […]
I bow to my altar of scars, white as lion bones on my arms, each an icon to violence which first stirred in me when schoolgirls taunted my odd physical strength. I could heft an ax, split oak easily as twigs. The girls cast stones at the seashore. I mortared them into a pillar. With […]
Ox Goad What did you expect? Accolades? Laurels without thorns? To have come this far…. To have grasped God’s hand….. Be wary when your burden lightens. Your heart is wrestling an ox in a muddy feedlot with an open gate! He doesn’t move. You prod him with spurs. He swishes flies, bellows, backs away. Come […]
How The Two Become One Jacob wrestled wind howling inside him until it returned his brother’s face, as when wind shakes the leaves after a brief summer rain to prolong its sweetness and startle the trees into thinking they’re clouds. Face to Face Alone, I waited on the river bank for you alone, having sent […]
Handiwork At dawn God opens one hand to let cramped darkness flee. All night clouds of glory float beyond reach of dreams, beyond a prayer book and a clock which waits with you until dawn to help you wrestle the dark back into God’s other hand. Hand of God They scratched Your Names on wooden […]