ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Sarah Van Arsdale is the author of four books of fiction. Her first novel, Toward Amnesia, was published by Riverhead Books in 1995, and her most recent, In Case of Emergency, Break Glass, was published in 2016 by Queens Ferry Press. Her poetry and essays have been published in or are scheduled to appear in magazines including Guernica, Another Chicago Magazine, the AWP Writers Chronicle, and The New Guard. She teaches creative writing in the low-residency MFA program at Antioch University, at New York University, and privately; in January, 2019, she’ll be co-leading a workshop in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Poets Resist
Edited by Cody Stetzel
August 27, 2018
Edited by Cody Stetzel
August 27, 2018
What We Knew
We knew what was coming, dear heart,
we’d read our science, watched the tv news.
We just didn’t know how the end would start.
That year spring stayed cool, and dark.
We wore our sweaters into early June.
We said we didn’t know, but our hearts
knew — though all of us, of a certain part
of race and class whined about the bloom’s
delay, asking when spring would ever really start.
July’s sudden heat stunned us; city parks
swarmed with humans when the power blew.
We whispered what we knew in our hearts.
Rain followed, with flooding off the charts.
We laid in flashlights, stashed our food.
We joked that this could be the start.
We marveled at the wind and dark.
We couldn’t speak of what we knew.
It was coming, and oh dear heart
We knew bad as it was, this was just the start.
Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
