Mark Halliday
Curving through the currents undistracted
with tailfin half as long as its body
it watches for those whose luck has been absurd

but the sea is vast and I paddle softly
so it seems quite possible the Thresher will miss me
even quite probable in the mapless blue-black floods

provided I paddle ever softly without splashes
not too close to any school of obvious meatfish
who have not even imagined the strange long tailfin

which suddenly (the books say) whips the water
till life is nothing but panic—oh let me never know
that monstrous slapping and the razor teeth

let me never fathom the unluckiness of South Sudan
or of Yemen or of Syria or of the south side of Chicago
let me swim where misery is a rumor inviting tropes

though my good luck has been absurd and I know it
I say I know it I keep saying I know it
but softly lest that long finned force take an interest

and with absolute concentration move to teach me
how much a minnow with many metaphors matters
and what are the limits of luck in the blue-black floods.
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ELIZABETH LUND ON HOW TO LOVE A COUNTRY AND OTHER BEST COLLECTIONS TO READ THIS MONTH
 
Lund reviews Richard Blanco's How to Love a Country, Ilyse Kusnetz's Angel Bones, Paisley Rekdal's Nightingale, and  Dobby Gibson's Little Glass Planet.

via THE WASHINGTON POST
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Read this week's issue of What Sparks Poetry.

"He probably introduced the poems with something about unusual words and whether we knew what juniper and pied meant. But I wasn’t listening. I was reading: “One must have a mind of winter… junipers shagged with ice … rough in the distant glitter,” and wondering what it felt like to be cold so long that your mind turned wintery and you felt like a snowman. I was repeating silently to myself over and over that mysterious, solemn, slow last line. “The nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Nothing and nothing at the far-end of a long sentence and an un-foot-printed walk through the snow."

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