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Lucy Alford

Lucy Alford is the author of Forms of Poetic Attention (Columbia University Press, 2020) assistant professor of literature at Wake Forest University. Her poems have appeared in Harpur Palate, Literary Matters, the Warwick Review, Streetlight, and Atelier. Her scholarly work has been published in Philosophy & Literature, Dibur, and Modern Language Notes.

To See the World Before the End of the Earth

For Ed Roberson


People are flocking in very small numbers


to see the world before the end of the earth—


Earth, this flat plate, this


garden of rocks


rubbled so utterly I sink


my hands into it


at the end of the mind’s yard.



Sunday at the conservatory, families drag


themselves in out of the city for something to do


with the kids: enriching,


as the thick artificial tropics


of the air, as the invisible


hands that built these walls,


as the pulpy loam,


as the children’s shrieks


and babble, running from fountain to fern


room to shatter, crystalline,


against the vaulted glass.



Now, Here


But it wasn’t always this way—


birds in the black walnut bleep bleep bleep. Black


walnuts crash on a tin house town. Your brother


loved guns and went outside.


They took his skin away. Won’t you


come sit here with me a while.


We don’t know what anything smells like anymore.


Black walnut inner rind tin smear. Search.


There is no search for this. Neither key


nor word. Come sit


a while. Bed down


with me a while in the nowhere.


Bed down with me in the nowhere.



Autumn, Killing Time


The spiders descend.

From the rafters of my fire

escape, they catch hold

of moving things, to be stilled

in silken seizure. I lift my face

to the bodies arrayed

in night air, exhale

my American Spirit upward, wonder:

Will my breath, too, catch

in their transparent kingdom

and be stilled?

A dead leaf, accidental capture,

dangles downward, its dance

the only sign of an otherwise

imperceptible breeze.

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