Seaside Improvisation

Richard Siken

I take off my hands and I give them to you but you don’t                                                                                   want them, so I take them back        and put them on the wrong way, the wrong wrists. The yard is dark,the tomatoes are next to the whitewashed wall,                                                     the book on the table is about Spain,                                                                                                        the windows are painted shut.Tonight you’re thinking of cities under crowns                    of snow and I stare at you like I’m looking through a window,                                                                                                                counting birds.                                                             You wanted happiness, I can’t blame you for that,and maybe a mouth sounds idiotic when it blathers on about joy          but tell meyou love this, tell me you’re not miserable.                                                                       You do the math, you expect the trouble.                      The seaside town. The electric fence.Draw a circle with a piece of chalk. Imagine standing in a constant cone                                                  of light. Imagine surrender. Imagine being useless.A stone on the path means the tea’s not ready,         a stone in the hand means somebody’s angry, the stone inside you stillhasn’t hit bottom.

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Richard Siken is a poet and painter. His book Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, selected by Louise Glück, a Lambda Literary Award, a Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and I Do Know Some Things (forthcoming, Copper Canyon Press, 2025). Siken is a recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

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Crush
Yale University Press
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“The immense wingspan of influence that Crush has on 21st-century American poetry cannot be overstated. Not only does Siken center Queer yearning, he fills those poems with the detritus of life—the cacti, taco stands, twenty-four-hour supermarkets, interstates, boots and shag rugs—a project begun by William Carlos Williams, and here made palpable, enriched and enlarged to a whole new generation.”
—Ocean Vuong, author of Time Is a Mother

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