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All but braying, a sadness that animal.
And the walk is a rite wherein
the sadness may, if only
for a moment, forget its many reasons to be
(hence the attention again
to other fields,
where leaves burn by the fence-
posts and the fields further out,
forgetting the leaves altogether and the smell of them).
The walk is a ritual wherein
the scenery exists mostly outside the self.
There is a ridge then below us only ocean,
a kind of shorthand for stillness
born on the back of something else.
This poem was one of the winners of the 2013 "Discovery" Poetry Contest.
Julia Guez’s essays, interviews, poems and translations have appeared in POETRY, Circumference, PEN Poetry Series, BOMBlog, The Boston Review, The Guardian, Apogee and DIAGRAM. She has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, the "Discovery"/ Boston Review Poetry Prize and the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation. Guez lives in Brooklyn and on-line @G_U_E_Z ; she is the managing director of Brooklyn-based programming at Teach For America-New York and teaches creative writing at Rutgers.
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Poetry
in your carpeted office you lay my life down / and say open up to that small room in my sternum.
In his new book, the former Fed chair cuts through economic orthodoxy on central banking. But he fails to reckon deeply with its political consequences.
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