its throat into song. The birds are gone and the deer are greedy,
eager to cauterize. Slip me
a hinge. My hands are tied like blackened flies. My fingers: hackle and feather.
Rock, rock, quiet water, rock. What rhymes with rose
-flushed glass? The sun’s a blood-bath.
26 The Paris-American
Beth Bachmann is the author of Temper (Pitt Poetry Series, 2009), winner of the AWP Donald Hall Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her new manuscript won the 2011 Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award for a book in progress. Find her at www.bethbachmann.com
