In David’s Image

Sarah Wetzel

I imagine Michelangelo's The Davidin the dark, the air conditioner filtering outthe dust and microscopic particles of skinand hair, the minuscule piecesof his body. He is near deathor far from it, depending on how one feelsabout centuries. He is perfect.Even his overlarge hands have a purpose.I imagine The David gone.I imagine every version of him gone—and then to see him without knowingof him. To see not myselfin the mirror, to insteadsee the mirror. Yet lookhow the face persists!

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Sarah Wetzel is the author of the poetry collection The Davids Inside David, recently released from Terrapin Books. She is also the author of River Electric with Light, which won the AROHO Poetry Publication Prize and was published by Red Hen Press in 2015, and Bathsheba Transatlantic, which won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was published in 2010. Her poems have been published in such journals as Barrow Street, Diode, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. She is a PhD student in Comparative Literature in the CUNY Graduate Center and teaches creative writing, when she can, at The American University of Rome. She holds an engineering degree from Georgia Tech and an MBA from Berkeley. More importantly for her poetry, she completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Bennington College. You can see some more of her work at www.sarahwetzel.com.

West Caldwell, New Jersey

"Sarah Wetzel’s vulnerable and intimate lyrical gestures inhabit the delicate space between this world and the world to come, between one century, one moment, and the next. Their verbs gather ghostly bodies in Rome and Tuscany, in Georgia and New York; every object they encounter becomes a sacred door. This is a memoir of a woman who moves through art as through the world, who moves through the world as through an ever changeful museum of art. She demonstrates again and again that we are never alone, even after deaths and divorce, even before the mirror of our most radiantly broken self."
—Marcela Sulak, Decency

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