I wake up too close
to the underside of your arm—

a flaccid white fish
against my brown cheek.

My eyes are still closed
but I've memorized

your body, I don't have to look
to see you aged and aimless,

landscape of non-cancerous
but severely atypical moles

on the skin. I put my hand
in yours, and when you wake

with your opulent anxiety, reaching
for your pills and phone, scrolling

maniacally, I see that you've
refused the one thing

I'm offering. At midnight
I lie upstairs while you

are at the piano, a staircase
away from me. To be

near you is not ordinary, a flame
at its center, furling

from the inside out, heart
flailing. Still, how many

dawns you've lain absent,
my solitary mornings

on the terrace, missing
you, a staircase away.

I've watched the palm trees
a hundred times now, the way

they stand in solidarity,
constant and separate, against

the blue. Even as I hear
you playing Bowie

through the floorboards
I think maybe this

is not what I made it out
to be. Soon

you'll be cranky from hunger
and we'll scramble

eggs together, sit on
the porch, share

a single cigarette. Here,
I'll say. I'm here. Will you pretend

I haven't spoken? Maybe it's not
you I long for, but the woman

I once was, in another
time zone, looking at the trees.
from the book TENDER MACHINES / Tupelo Press
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Headshots of Jane Clarke, Ishion Hutchinson, Sharon Olds
"Shortlisted TS Eliot Prize Poets Speak to a Disrupted World"

"The 10 listed collections range from 'zany intimacy' by Sharon Olds to explorations of Black identity from Ishion Hutchinson and Jason Allen-Paisant. 'We are confident that all 10 shortlisted titles not only meet the high standards they set themselves but speak most effectively to, and of, their moment,' said Irish poet and judging chair Paul Muldoon, a past winner of the prize. 'If there's a single word for that moment it is surely 'disrupted', and all these poets properly reflect that disruption.'"

via THE GUARDIAN
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Cover image of Brain Teare's book, Poem Bitten By A Man
What Sparks Poetry:
Brian Teare on Other Arts


"In exceeding the frame of visual description, ekphrasis in the expanded field refuses to dwell only on the surface experience of visual art—or film or dance or music. Going outside of the frame and beneath the surface, it engages with another art by reconceptualizing and recontextualizing it: in its historical and cultural and subcultural contexts, its critical reception, its making and materials."
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