Sean Nevin is the author of Oblivio Gate, selected for the Crab Orchard Award Series First Book Prize (Southern Illinois University Press) and A House That Falls (Slapering Hol Press). His honors include a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry selected by Robert Pinsky, the […]
Black and polished with light, it treads the air beneath the arched soffits of our house, where this morning I smeared, with a clean metal blade, a dollop of putty over the bullet-sized hole it bore into the wood. I watched, for an hour that bee, tap-tap-tapping like the severed tip of a cane groping […]
We estimate a man by how much he remembers. —Ralph Waldo Emerson Things seem to take on a sudden shimmer before vanishing: the polished black loafers he wore yesterday, the reason for climbing the stairs, even the names of his own children are swallowed like spent stars against the dark vault of memory. Today the […]
I lost my fear of dying when I slammed my hand in the passenger-side door of my father’s ’61 Cadillac Coupe DeVille as we waited for a parking attendant outside M’s Funeral Home. It was religious, the way pain shook my hand, hard and electric, straight through the bone in my shoulder, like the funeral […]
I like the thought of it, a small sea horse curled in the dark coral reef of my brain. Hippo from the Greek for horse and kampos for sea monster. Imagine it no bigger than a fingertip, my own mounted sentry, stationed there as gatekeeper to the catacombs of memory itself. It’s deep and alone […]
—Norton Island, Maine For ten days now, two luna moths remain silk-winged and lavish as a double broach pinned beneath the porch light of my cabin. Two of them, patinaed that sea-glass green of copper weather vanes nosing the wind, the sun-lit green of rockweed, the lichen’s green scabbing-over of the bouldered shore, the plush […]
By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not. —Song of Solomon 3:1 I. If we are truly the sum of our memories, tonight you are not my husband but a young soldier in Korea, whispering across a mud trench in snow. You warn […]
I. The darkness you sense in the half-lit garden becomes two deer, grazing themselves into existence. Their eyes are stoked coals. Their quick heads are the shape of anvils and are forged entirely of hunger and bone. They lift, then pause between the plum tomato’s yellow blossoms as if to take measure of the world […]