No signs outside my window, nothing to read into autumn.
The wind with such velocity, it reminds me we’ve said too many things.
Most animals, most animals prefer silence. The distances at which we know each other
tell us little of how the dead know the earth. Do you think restraint is a feeling you can aim with
when it’s bloodless at the center? Do you think you have time?
I’m not sure what’s more important anymore, our American past or future. And today is a thread
I’ve had in my mouth for too long. Its color has dissolved on my tongue.
It no longer remembers the fabric it came from, it no longer wants to remember at all.
23 The Paris-American
Alex Dimitrov's first book of poems, Begging for It, will be published this March by Four Way Books. His poems have been published in the Yale Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Slate, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and Boston Review. He is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Award from the American Poetry Review, founder of Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York City, and the author of American Boys, an e-chapbook published by Floating Wolf Quarterly earlier this year. Dimitrov works at the Academy of American Poets, teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, and frequently writes for Poets & Writers.
