Winner of the 2013 Yellowwood Poetry Prize, as chosen by Traci Brimhall.

 

I walk out on someone’s .424 on-base percentage
					               	               	          	            into a dusk wound through 
a state with fifty-six thousand refugees.
Two backyard puddles relidded 
by a night now the sound of the rain meeting the rain,
						
small hands, small hands unmuting a horn. 
Could I count the –ologies in the wind,
			       	                       		              -ont  or -eschat,
I’d be no nearer to adding the name of Lot’s wife
to the Book of Names,
				               lost for good,
lost for good wherever we are,
			   		                        yet I’ve counted it not
but triumph when I became season
& taste for another, 
& though I know we all become amnesia

or agony in the end, still the round numbers terrify:
six thousand assaults in this state last year,
				                  	               	                six hundred suicides,
some jackal-headed numerology
behind the imprecision.

Every ransom’s different,
but one might begin with putting your needs
before my own, 

until the self resembles nothing 
more than a day-shot threnody-stitched palimpsest
on which the disappearances are overwritten. 
					           	               	                     Voice meeting voice,
this jar poured out now,
one translucent arc
that will join the unlit subliminal groundwater

before the storm passes on,
& the moon’s reapparitioned above, white as salt.

 

 

—-

 

 

Mark Wagenaar’s debut book of poems, Voodoo Inverso, won the 2012 Pollak Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press. He has won numerous poetry awards, & his poems have most recently been accepted by Tin House, Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, Ninth Letter, & Triquarterly. He & his wife, fellow poet Chelsea Wagenaar, are both University of Virginia alums, & are now doctoral fellows at the University of North Texas. They recently adopted a half Lab half Catahoula Leopard puppy from the town shelter & named him Gideon Littlefoot.