Anhvu Buchanan is the author of The Disordered (sunnyoutside press) and Backhanded Compliments & Other Ways to Say I Love You (Works on Paper Press ) and Which Way To Go, or Here (Platypus Press, 2016) co-written with Brent Piller. He currently teaches in Berkeley.



Brent Piller is the co-author (along with Anhvu Buchanan) of the mini-chapbook Which Way to Go, or Here (Platypus Press, 2016). His poems have appeared recently in or forthcoming in (b)OINK, Gramma, Wildness, Reservoir, and Yellow Chair Review.



Anhvu Buchanan and Brent Piller

O Night I Left You

Somewhere we open our eyes, elegies and endless wounds. We left for the history of a better ocean. The boats are in our bones. Every shipwreck is a sign that says keep going. The outline of can't forget glued to our chests. We made this light together. Meaning we learn to shadow to survive. There is an owl buried in my throat. No. There is a seagull chained to my shoulders. We made an altar out of anchors. Keep going. The sky is the sky and the heart a weather balloon that forgot how to fly. No one knows me better than the fish, than the calm of underwater like a mother's lullaby sleeping in my lungs. We left to discover a million new smells. We left the only way we knew how, with our arms tied behind our backs, eyes closed in the blur of the night, following the shipwrecks toward a future we were never promised.


Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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