Elegy (Deserted)

Eryn Green

Hope: the following page. Do not close the book.
I have turned all the pages of the book without finding hope.
Perhaps hope is the book.
—Edmond Jabés

We live on            the edge ofA raft through            dejectionA joy almost            too greatTo speak, so            it takesBreath,            so we breakAt the end            of the lineWhenever we see the sun            go onThe entire Death            Valley coveredIn a carpet of yellow            and goldpinafores. And you can't            imagine the hillsAny more than            denyThe contours            the failingLight that gives            every angleA vision            as it goes

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Eryn Green’s first book, Eruv, was selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and was published by Yale University Press in 2014. His second book, Beit, was selected as the 2019 Editor’s Choice at New Issues Press, and will be released in April 2020. Eryn’s poetry, criticism, and non-fiction has been featured in The New York Times, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Interim, Conduit, Painted Bride Quarterly, jubilat, and elsewhere. Currently as Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches Creative Writing, Mythology, and coordinates the World Literature Program, Eryn lives near the Red Rock Canyon Conservation area with his wife and daughter.

# 29

Saint Paul, Minnesota

Editor in Chief
William D. Waltz

Deputy Editor
Brett Astor

Assistant Editor
Kyle Constalie

Associate Editors
Steven Lee Beeber
William Stobb
Paula Cisewski

Conduit is a biannual literary journal that is at once direct, playful, inventive, irreverent, and darkly beautiful. Despite common sense and the laws of economics, Conduit has been thwarting good taste, progress, and consensus for over twenty years. Conduit publishes distinctive voices of literary merit—experimental to accessible, established to emerging—in snazzy volumes, featuring work that demonstrates originality, intelligence, courage, and humanity. Conduit champions a fresh mix of writers. If that isn’t enough, Conduit reaches beyond the literary by interviewing astronomers, ethno-botanists, artists, graphic artists, and historians, et cetera, believing a vigorous imagination is one that is cross-pollinated by diverse areas of human inquiry.

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