Homepage photograph via Flickr by flickr

Tomorrow morning I will take a shower,
nothing else is certain but this.
A future of water and of talc
in which nothing follows and no one
knocks at the door. The crooked
river will fall through the steam and I
like a hermit will stay
beneath the tepid rain,
but neither visions nor temptations
will cross the opaque mirror.
Unmoving and silent, coursed
by infinite streams,
I will stay in the current
like a trunk or a dead horse,
and I will conclude stranded in thought,
a long lonely delta of the spirit,
intricate like a woman’s sex.

Valerio Magrelli
Valerio Magrelli was born in Rome in 1957. He is the author of four poetry collections and has received the Mondello Prize, the Viareggio Prize for Poetry, and the Montale Prize. He is a professor of French literature at the University of Cassino. His poems have been widely translated around the globe.

Adam Palumbo
Adam Palumbo received his BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Richmond. While there, he won the Margaret Haley Carpenter Award for Poetry. He has had essays, reviews, and poems published by The Rumpus, PANK, St. Katherine Review, and the Wilfred Owen Association Journal. He currently lives in Annapolis, MD.