& then there’s a bee in the hand: buzz nuzzled into skin skina muzzle when instinct clenches & lily when fingers release now all pink & blooming with sting sting that rips the body from the body that swells of pulse & insistence above sun-stained bricks: bricksbelligerent in their heat in their fortitude in their inability to abandon post & dive in the water below bellowing river to unpluck reflection or mellow into tree branch or lamppost on that bright day sky just greying at the edges now edging building & bank into smoke & blur & smudge— no way to build sight but through sound so listen: the last light that stings the palm palms that stretch reach ravel rubthe day from the skin the brick hear it? from the lily the pulse the palm & now look up look up:
7:28 PM: above the river the bridge the bridge
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“7:28 PM: above the river the bridge the bridge” is from night myths • • before the body by Abi Pollokoff (Red Hen Press 2024). Used with permission from the publisher.
Abi Pollokoff is the author of night myths • • before the body (Red Hen Press, 2025). A Pushcart-nominated poet, her poems can be found in journals such as TriQuarterly, The Seventh Wave, and Radar, where she was a finalist for the Coniston Prize. A winner of the Academy of American Poets / Anselle M. Larson Prize and a former AWP Writer to Writer mentee, Abi has been supported by organizations such as the Jack Straw Cultural Center and Hugo House. She is the managing editor for Poetry NW Editions and works in publishing. Find her at abipollokoff.com.
In Abi Pollokoff’s debut collection, night myths • • before the body, we experience a storm of language. But what a carefully calibrated storm it is: one where lineation and the cadence of semantically driven breath create an atmospheric meaning that holds the reader with the same trembling electricity as pre-lightning static. On the page we not only see but also feel and hear the new topography rendered by this weather—like the echo of water’s shape stamped on the land after a storm—and receive a text that is freshly embodied, fully realized, and, as Pollokoff writes, “all verbed out.” In this propulsive work, the tension between sound and syntax sings like rain on dry earth. As Pollokoff writes, “watch the body.” I can’t take my eyes away.
—Keetje Kuipers, author of All Its Charms, The Keys to the Jail, and Beautiful in the Mouth
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