Discover Top Posts Tagged with #erica wright

The Row Essentials

for Lucie Brock-Broido

We invent a city for loss, keep childhoods there, love letters and pennies, the last time we slipped

our feet into the leech-filled waters of a creek, marveled at hunger, then at weightlessness.

We forgot the names for stars and stored them: pulsar, wolf-rayet, and magnetar.

We think airships go on forever. We think the sky’s got a harbor.

The trick is knowing to separate the manmade clouds from the cumulus

of my heart. Did I say heart? Did I say mine? Mostly dreams are long cons, but this one has legs.

There’s a warehouse in our new capitol just for hairpins, their copper gleam too bright

for the streets outside. And the bricks shine of their own accord, each one a beacon

on nights when others hide from the wind. Come, wind.

Nestle your length next to mine, let me feel you shake my teeth.

Still, the amber slips into a drain. Still, the tabby vanishes around a corner,

and around the corner, a tower, and inside the tower, there’s nobody. Our girl as nowhere as she can be.

Which is to say, not even our dreams— let alone the world—can hold such promise for long.

The Unknown City by Erica Wright

Self Care by Mac Miller from the album Swimming (contains a sample of On & On by Erykah Badu) - Director: Christian Weber

The trick is knowing to separate the manmade clouds from the cumulus of my heart. Did I say heart? Did I say mine?

Erica Wright, “The Unknown City,” published in Tupelo Quarterly

A poem by Erica Wright

Infrastructure

Under the one-track overpass, Micah scrawled his name three times— at the beginning then middle then end

as if aware that there are always three of us in a body, like Christ but also like your neighbor who lost

his mother then wife then son and turned loud then still then gone. Where are his visitations:

past, present, or future? Each day I wake to cries though I mean to rise before them. After the next mistake,

I make tea then forget I made tea. Micah, I'll remember you like you asked with your Magic Marker in the dead

of the night when I'd already turned into the third person of myself, as brave as I ever was or will be.

Erica Wright

Instructions for Killing the Jackal, Erica Wright

Instructions for Killing the Jackal, Erica Wright

Instructions for Killing the Jackal, Erica Wright

#erica wright