23*
The willing ass is bared to be whipped with electricity. Come to me lover in Apollo’s chariot; I want to wash myself in the dawn of your hair, as alder pollen is paroled on an April breeze.
51
Does the yolk of my attention not divide like gum?
105
The mountain can do without scaffolding around the foothills, but the applepicker cannot do without her basket, a ladder.
107
Age taught me this, daughter, to recollect a time before I knew to want virginity, when I wanted other things. As I do now.
111
“Good God!” Coming together is a feat to rival the conquer of nations. The strain tears more than a piece of tissue. Whole cities crack from the ceilings, wings spanking the air back in droves.
112
Honey never spoils. The eyes aglow with want are living.
119
The wash of each page a dripping fabric, having caught a shower, hangs heavy at the ankles stringing ropes or blisters.
140
One man’s death is mourned by a battalion whose shoulders bear daily the burden of some hero risen and falling.
160
Bird song bubbles and drops like a plateful of water on wet rock, for those robins who go on listening to each other.
* Numbers corresponds to translations in If Not, Winter, by Anne Carson
Amy Wright is the Nonfiction Editor of Zone 3 Press and the author of three chapbooks, with her fourth forthcoming in spring 2014. Her work appears in a number of journals, including Drunken Boat, American Letters & Commentary, Quarterly West, Bellingham Review, Brevity, Western Humanities Review, and Denver Quarterly. She was awarded a 2012 Peter Taylor Fellowship for the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop.
