Hands Trace Air
- Hands Trace Air
poetry, Joan Houlihan
HANDS TRACE AIR — knots, ropes.Scaffold. There's no fixing it.His bed-thought hurtlesits rails, his boyhood trainsmokes, coils away.Tuck the blanket under my chin.What does he feel going cold?Room-gust, my hand passing over?Awake on a shore where it's never the future,afraid he will last no longer,he goes down a stair in his chest.Give me a mirror so I can see behind me. [End Page 477]
joan houlihan is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Ay. Her poetry has been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries and The Book of Irish-American Poetry–Eighteenth Century to Present. She is a contributing critic for the Contemporary Poetry Review and author of a series of essays on contemporary American poetry. She currently teaches in the Lesley University Low-Residency MFA Program and Clark University in Worcester, MA. Houlihan is founder and director of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.
