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.