The Silo

Kasey Jueds

Who keeps your secretsnow?—now that the grain you keptto feed the winter herdis gone, the cows long gonefrom the stalls where not eventheir ghosts shift in the cold-sealed dim and imaginepasture. The metal rungsthat climb your side starthalfway up and hang useless,now that you are madeof silence, of cinderblocksencircling air. Who callsthe sparrows to clingto the rim of you, and tracetheir momentary outlinesagainst the flux of sky?Do you know that sometimesI hear my lover in anotherroom, and think for a momenthe is the one I told myselfI loved before, the onewho hurt me? Little engineof the mind stuttering, littleneedle skipping againstthe record's black discwhere it hits the scratchedplace, the damage—beforesomeone lifts the player's armand shifts it so the songcan go on. Please tell meyou remember the time my new loveand I found our waythrough the wrecked barn'sunderstory, and unboltedthe door that led to you.We could finally see insideto where animal skeletonsgleamed in the circle of grassat your base—not, of course,the cows, but wild thingstrapped, unable to scaleyour steep sides to the muteO far above, the open mouthmuffled by cloud. Who couldtell us how the animals cameto die there, fell or strayedinto something finished? Whocould give us the story we thoughtwe wanted to hear? And which oneof us thought to call youruined then, which oneto name you almost beautiful?

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photo of Kasey Jueds

Kasey Jueds is the author of two collections of poetry, both from the University of Pittsburgh Press: Keeper, which won the 2012 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and The Thicket. Her work can be found in journals including American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Narrative, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ninth Letter, Cincinnati Review, Bennington Review, and Pleiades. She lives in a small town in the mountains of New York State.

cover of The Thicket

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

"In Kasey Jueds’s gorgeous new book, The Thicket, every flower, thorn, and body of water is both archetype and fact. These rich lyrics act as doors to a transformation like sleep or like season. Jueds’s poems are like living inside a spell, a magic that is both story and circle. With her close attention to nature and stunning litanies, she enchants the natural world around us and reminds us that through all of our painful changes, ‘how long it takes to become human again.’ Read this book and let yourself be spellbound."
—Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless To the Land of Nod

"The reader is lead gently, generously, into The Thicket as if by hand, branches parted to show what only Kasey Jueds knows—the stories of trees, the language of the wind, and the hush of secret places long undisturbed. In these poems, Jueds attends to the natural world, reveals in rich lyricism its cadences and questions. In a chaotic, distracted world, these poems insist we pause, look, and look again."
—Leila Chatti, author of Tunsiya/Amrikiya

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