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  • The Unquarried Blue of Those Depths Is All but Blinding
  • Ashley Anna McHugh (bio)

There are some things we just don't talk about—Not even in the morning, when we're waking,When your calloused fingers tentatively walkThe slope of my waist:            How love's a rust-worn boat,Abandoned at the dock—and who could doubtWaves lick their teeth, eyeing its hull? We're takingOur wreckage as a promise, so we don't talk.We wet the tired oars, tide drawing us out.

We understand there's nothing to be said.Both of us know the dangers of this sea,Warned by the tide-worn driftwood of our pasts—.But we've already strayed from the harbor. We threadA slow wake through the water—then silently,We start to row, and will for as long as this lasts.

Ashley Anna McHugh

Ashley Anna McHugh's forthcoming book, Into These Knots, is the 2010 winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize. Become All Flame, a chapbook of her poetry was published by LATR Editions earlier this year. She was the 2009 winner of the Morton Marr Poetry prize, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Criterion, DIAGRAM, and Measure.

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