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  • Diorama
  • Kristina Faust (bio)

We stepped out the back door into thick fog and drove to school.Each tree was a portrait of a tree, every dog a soloist.All sounds traveled only as far as breath.

It's like a diorama, I said, pretending to win the game. Have a good day.And you stepped out into it. I steered toward home, resolving to finda shoe box, paper, and bristled trees.

In the layered world only the nearest things were certain.The next nearest were as they might be if softly presented behind wax paper.Anything else was lost to speculation.

The legs of the water tower might rise forty stories.The corn field could go on for miles. The door to the school might open into a cloud,and when you walked through it, you fell and fell.

And so the satisfaction of the diorama is in the arrest of the loved thing.A deer, perhaps, in manageable miniature bowing her head to cedar-stained waterbut never drinking, and never shot.

Later, if you sit with me, I'll paint hills like eyelids,eyelids beyond eyelids, fading to the sky. [End Page 13]

Kristina Faust

Kristina Faust holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her poems have appeared recently in The Georgia Review, Mid-American Review, and Blackbird. She received the 2018 Disquiet Literary Prize for poetry.

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