Monica Ferrell’s first poetry collection, Beasts for the Chase, won the 2007 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Jane Hirschfield, and was published in 2008 by Sarabande Books. Her poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Fence, Paris Review, and other magazines. A former “Discovery”/The Nation prizewinner and Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she is […]
In the rain I stood a leaf detached from its tree by the lake where I waited aimlessly for your face to appear in the rain. You were always golden, a shower of insignificant things, I a Danae, coiled up yet somehow powerless against such rain. When you talked, words spilled from your […]
I rise like a red balloon, untethered and vacant. The essence of my dolor has become rarefied, Holy; like a fragrance, bodiless, without referent. It is a pale shadow on the sun, a wasp’s-wing, accidental Splash of poison on the white rose’s thorn— I twist it in my fingers and faint. Shall I tell […]
Sorrento, your sun is light yellow lemonskin, your sky Purling out like a farther surf on which I ride away From that secret in a German town. I left behind A dragon of enigma to fester there without me, I left A small god ticking like a time bomb: a tiny jade statue suspended By […]
Picture it: a girl in a strange city Unpacking her suitcase, setting things on shelves In the middle of the folds rises the berry Of her determination, a black pearl on white cloth As fine-wrapped as a baby Jesus Or new star—she the one who will set it in the sky Tomorrow, it’s only the […]
Alexander wept in Babylon, not because his father had died or his old tutor had looked at him finally with those eyes of stone but because the drink of Babylon was so good. It tasted of dandelion milk squeezed from a stalk still in its greenness. Here in his hand—the world: but first […]
To flux the snakebite I swallowed the whole Vial of venom. Presently, vapored and fevered, I Became the queen who lies on her lion-footed couch Sweating into the light white sheet of day. —Everyone is whispering behind a thin screen: They speak of her pulse, her signs of vitality, her blood Pressure, the awful […]
Somewhere in this world I will understand that room: a natural heaven—the personal swimming hole of the old Augustus—: What a beautiful crock. Yet how the boatman swindled us so gently; we hardly minded. And then— the violence of the sudden chain breaking us into the splendor of a […]