Finesse
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Finesse
With all the lost details,
you could have made a new world.
—Pierre Reverdy, “Voyages trop grands”
That spider that lived through winteron your living room ceiling—a stationary dot.
Houseplants you didn’t kill. Datesyou didn’t keep. All the hand-drawn
suns and flowers you receivedin kindergarten to commemorate your hernia,
your hospital stay.That gone feeling of going under the gas.
The taste of chocolate milkshakebiting your tongue.
Winter that survived in the abdomenof a spider, like a letter you write every day
in air. Flubbed lines at the audition.In Marrakesh, a map of Marrakesh, the monkey
posing for a picture on your back.More oranges. Fewer haircuts.
The words of the woman on the night train to Kiev.The night train to Kiev. [End Page 514]
Kiev.Your password and whatever you changed
it to. This too shall pass into worldly possession.Four tiny spiders that repopulated
the tundra of your ceiling. Filament of a letter.The day you connected the dots. [End Page 515]
KEVIN CRAFT is the author of Solar Prominence, selected by Vern Rutsala for the Gorsline Prize from Cloudbank Books (2005), and editor of five volumes of the anthology Mare Nostrum. A new collection, Vagrants & Accidentals, will be published in spring 2017 by UW Press. He directs the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College, and teaches in the University of Washington’s Creative Writing in Rome Program. Editor of Poetry Northwest from 2009–2016, he now serves as the executive editor of Poetry NW Editions.
