I’ve said goodbye to the twentieth century,
its porches choked with bindweed, its wild weeping
and wild grapevines. When finally the black
patrol car leaves, then you can hear the panting
of the train, the horses snorting, sweat steaming
in icy air. Nervous, you wonder what might be worth
taking for good: a useless notebook, minor
snapshots, cheap religious medals? Forests and cities
along the way sleep like huge dark churches.
I’ll not be coming back here, windows draped
with dirty towels, signs of widespread plague.
Below the sand, I’ve hidden a handful of words
not yet infected. For you. I put the rest outside
along with the still warm body to see how these times
will take care of it at night. What shape this era will carve
in the flesh, what will be left when morning arrives.
What Keeps Us
Poems to Read in Community
Inspired by C. D. Wright’s poem “What Keeps,” we offer Tomasz Różycki’s “This Era,” translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal, as part of a twenty-poem selection from poems we’ve featured in 2024—poems, like bread, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, or to oneself.
Read editor Lloyd Wallace’s introduction to the collection and statements from our staff readers here. Read poems by selecting below.
Throwback Night, Midway Skating Rink
The sun dipped already, but we sweating, edges ribboned under
summer’s breath.
My Father Walks Out of an English Book and Into an English Field
It was not long after the war—
and just saying after the war places him
Half-Life in Exile
I’m forever living between Aprils.
The air here smells of jacarandas and lime;
Country Song (Memory of Rain)
A bruise is a promised haunting.
“Come, just this once,” I ask, disingenuously. I mean “a thousand times.”
At the Gellert Baths, Budapest
Here in the body museum,
women speaking Hungarian
rinse one another with buckets of water,
As Though It Were a Small Child
I wake up these days, a new mother again, watching,
waiting, to understand what to offer, how to serve, by which I
mean,