SLIGHT OF HAND
This is a landscape to be sketched & left uncolored.
A boy stands at the crossroads of a ruined city, waving a bell without a whistle.
Consider the tumbleweed of his hair, consider the muscles in his neck,
white gossamer, tenuous like the brambles bearing the black walnuts of summer.
Every rock is a headstone waiting to be named:
Here lies the body of a newborn who saw only light in his life.
A procession of townspeople tour their city as if for the first time
peering into the cross-sections of houses where a shower head spews
brown hibiscus over the bathroom tiles, where a boy’s bed has unmade itself
& the bats locked in his sister’s diary have escaped & lodged their way
into the empty light sockets of her closet. A mother spools the husks of a broken crib
into the dress her daughters will wear when they drape the flag
back over the city gate & sing the anthem of their bodies.
This is all bound to happen again:
—from 2017 Rattle Young Poets Anthology
__________
Why do you like to write poetry?
Alex Greenberg: “Poetry lets me breathe when I feel stifled and serves as a vital outlet of expression for me. In poetry, there is a real sense of discovery that shocks me each time I sit down with a piece of paper and pen.”
