Six forty-seven a.m. is a bowl of bees on the tongue. The part still beneath
sheets leans into the bit lip of dawn. The impossible is less possible
in the bone-soaked light of a little February. Though summer will come,
someone will slide a tongue down my bleak back, slowly and purely.

For the foreseeable: forest of copy machines, a lack called wallpaper. Other
tired hearts radiate a little heat on the train, through windows of cars.
What’s past is throbbing, and I run past it, though I have not yet learned to calm
the muscle of wanting what I never had. So I grow round-eyed, wine-toothed,

and I grow old as the sun shoves off and the air goes black. Somewhere
the serrated surf is slicing sand beneath it. Somewhere there are children.
Obliterate a bit more until I’m among bloodstones in a field in Wyoming.
There is not one dignified thing about this life or that one.

Lisabeth Burton lives in Brooklyn, New York. She recently completed her MFA at Columbia University and works at W. W. Norton & Company. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Broome Review, Denver Quarterly, the North American Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Tin House. She is a recipient of the Stephen Dunn Prize in poetry and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers Magazine.

Poet’s Recommendations:

The Collected Stories by Grace Paley.

I Was the Jukebox: Poems by Sandra Beasley.

No Planets Strike by Josh Bell.

Homepage photo by Stephcarter via Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hyperbolation/3978392916