Borders by Adam Vines


 
         – Hopper’s Cape Cod Evening
 
 
But it seems
noonish, as if
a flash just burst
above a photographer’s
shroud, except for the firs,
blue as parrotfish,
with night bulging
through their needles.
At first, the man
on the stoop, white

sleeves rolled to the empty
shot glass of his shoulder,
seems to look
beyond the frame,
following the dog’s
eyes to some night sound,
but as I move closer,
he isn’t. He follows
his hand into

the tall grass, the same
grass that swallows
his wife to her knees.
She folds her arms
at her waist, leaning
against their white
house with red trim
like an inverted
stop sign. She will not
talk tonight. He hasn’t
talked for years.
 
 
Adam Vines is an assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he is Editor of Birmingham Poetry Review and Director of the English Honors Program. He has published recent poems in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Hopkins Review, Measure, and Subtropics, among others. He is the author of Out of Speech (forthcoming, LSU Press, 2018) and The Coal Life (U of Arkansas P, 2012), and he is coauthor of According to Discretion (Unicorn Press, 2015). During the summers, he is on staff at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.