He tells me to arrive early. Perched in his throat, a raven soaked
in warm milk. Finally, the sky dries into a painting.

I sit on a drainpipe all morning. I am fourteen. I have achieved
so little. The rottweiler next door will not eat. Instead, it catches butterflies in its mouth

and lets them go. School is out for Christmas. Boys walk the tree line
in the distance twirling axes. I press my palm into the snowy sidewalk—

stupid angel. I wonder who saved me. My hands are cowbells at the bottom
of an ocean. Here I am. Here I am. Does he even know my name? He calls me Chinaboy,

he calls me son. My first words to him are Morning, sir. It’s true, we take the good
out of everything we name. Summers, I cut his grass. I paint his house

black. No, I paint his house the same beige it was before. One day,
it rains. One day, a hive of bees in his gutter makes me their king. He feeds me

red meat. He watches the blood pool in my mouth, laughs at my red teeth.
In his car, he paints my thigh a deep purple

when he tells a dirty joke. I pull laughter from my mouth
like chicken bones. He tells me he had nothing to do with that girl. Nothing.

I don’t ask. I bury my hands underneath my thighs. He names me
after the glow of the full moon. I look away from the window. Slowly, I take the raven

into my mouth.
from the book MASTER/ Sarabande Books
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"The Lights" Reviewed
"The Lights: Ben Lerner's Poetry of Alien Illumination"

"Between the 'I' who remembers the sleepless night and the 'I' who probably slept for hours is another blurry border, on both sides of which we find Ben Lerner. He tells the story in his fourth collection of poems, The Lights (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). 'All my favorite books,' Lerner writes, 'were about built spaces / shading into wilds, worlds, Narnia through the wardrobe / . . . Max's bedroom becoming jungle, Harold drawing the moon / into existence.' Those books, which he read as a child and which now he reads to his young daughters, suggest a model for the kind of book he wants to be writing."

via THE NEW YORKER
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Cover of the journal, Gulf Coast
What Sparks Poetry:
Niki Herd on Language as Form

"My poems usually take several months, if not years, to write themselves but 'Lyric Sung in Third Person' will only take a few short months. I often think cinematically and the poem's draft is asking me to deviate from the conversational tone of my previous work. It's asking for a reflective and lyrical treatment. Here, I imagine a canvas filled with lineated images and caesuras in my attempt to engage the visual and kinetic energy of the page."
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