how was the snowAs if the snow were a province I’d visited,not a season come down upon me. As ifhe’d never stood on the ridge and watchedthe whole cloth of it blow inover the lake,blank and bridal.Any mark I’d made on the earth, it annulled:the dropped map, the poor footprints of children,the felts I pulled from their boots hoping they’d dryby morning. The snow was a fieldI woke in. Here are the driftsof my ribs for proof, here is my heartgone to windbreak. Brother, I am tiredof living bone-bound and uphill, of rolling through stopsto keep from getting stuck.The snow was irrevocable, songless.A relic. The ruinsof the wood.I made my way homeby ditch and by deadfall,all night laid awake in the stormlistening for the scrapeof the plow gone by, waitingfor the blade and my bodyto change the snow’s tensefrom falling and fallingto fell.
Elegy Beginning with a Text from My Brother
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“From If the house by Molly Spencer. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2019 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved. Originally from The Georgia Review, Volume LXXII, No. 3&4 (Fall/Winter 2018).”
Molly Spencer has recently published poetry in FIELD, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares,, and her debut collection, If the house, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Fall 2019. Spencer’s critical writing has appeared in the Colorado Review, the Kenyon Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy and is poetry editor at The Rumpus.
Fall 2018
Atlanta, Georgia
University of Georgia
Director & Editor
Gerald Maa
Managing Editor
C. J. Bartunek
Poetry Editor
Noah Baldino
The Georgia Review is the literary-cultural journal published out of the University of Georgia since 1947. While it began with a regional commitment, its scope has grown to include readers and writers throughout the U.S. and the world, who are brought together through the print journal as well as live programming. Convinced that communities thrive when built on dialogue that honors the difference between any two interlocutors, we publish imaginative work that challenges us to reconsider any line, distinction, or thought in danger of becoming too rigid or neat, so that our readers can continue the conversations in their own lives.
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