Quarantine
Chopin on the stereo. A bag of flour on the kitchen counter.The lamp emits a thin trembleof light. We are stirring olive oil with onionsin a steel pan and I am thinking of my Oma in 1938on the telephone with the Swiss embassy, her daughter in a hospital bedwith diphtheria while the war went on, then sailingacross the ocean to America with a piece of rye breadin her wool pocket. I am thinking about foresight, how it meansarriving at the moment before the momentarrives. I am thinking of walking through a forest, how the spacesbetween trees widen like telescopes. Oncemy father and I rode up a chairlift in the middle of a blizzard,then skied down toward a city we believed in but could not see.I am thinking of the white cloud of the present.I am thinking of a time before newspapers or windowsor the idea of heaven. I am thinking of magnetic fields, the raw materialof mountains. I stand up. I take the hand of the person I love.Is it true that only time can tell? I ask but don't wait for the answer.He has entered the room like a stray cat sheltering from a storm.We will sit at a wood table encased in a circleof light, saying the names of flowers that we know, and repeating them.
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- October 30, 2024
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“Quarantine” from ONCE, THIS FOREST BELONGED TO A STORM: by Austen Leah Rose.
Published by University of Massachusetts Press in April, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Austen Leah Rose.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Austen Leah Rose is a Dornsife Fellow at the University of Southern California, where she teaches poetry. Her debut book, Once, This Forest Belonged to a Storm, won the 2022 Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press. Her poems have appeared in Narrative, the Sewanee Review, AGNI, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. She has a PhD from the University of Southern California and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University.
“A work of deeply sensitive intelligence and lucidity, Once, This Forest Belonged to a Storm is an original and beautifully observed book. In this poet’s hands, the precision of life astonishes: Fallen snow is 'lit as if plugged in.' Later, 'fireflies nestled like hot pearls in the grass.' One moment, your attention is caught by the poems’ faithfully calibrated particulars; the next, you find yourself immersed in the strangeness of our most intimate connections and losses. These are searching, clear, wise, and wonderful poems.”
—Jenny George, author of The Dream of Reason
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