JEREMY ALLAN HAWKINSAbout the Coming Down
this is my house about loneliness the rooms open so you can see all the reindeer I haven’t wished much in it but flowers keep growing in the doorframes eat one & nothing happens eat two & the wood begins to talk you can see what it says from the hill amoebas of smoke swim out from the windows everyone is inside making happy redundant as the grazing reindeer & I am learning how to winnow because several neighbors have requested it nothing is projected before Christmas except a few deaths by icicle that will separate some of us from the spreadsheets of likelihood there were drugs once but they made us fat which is good for winter the bartender weeps because weddings remind him of his drunk & cold as we are we don’t care to leave him any company a van warming up on a snowy driveway is a deathtrap waiting to slip town new tactics must be found to keep us from sinking into sleep so I am sculpting a hearth to hold our collection of miniature boots they are tramping all over us again penguins crossing an ice floe one of them goes off alone then one of them goes off alone 198 The Paris-American 
Jeremy
Allan Hawkins was raised in the New York Hudson Valley. He is an alumnus of the
US Fulbright Program and the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project. His
poetry has recently appeared in Tin House, Waxwing, Harvard Review, Ninth Letter, and other journals. He is currently based in France.
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Next week's poet:
Catherine Pierce 
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