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BETH BACHMANN

(landscape: hyperventilation)

You or I or the air says deeper: breathe; the brain            needs blood. Mountain-sick, the moon 

comes nearer, giving in. More    blood? Isn’t it full? Where to put the mountain in relation to

the shadow, the human, the hunt, the hole in the fence?              Almanac says, if there is no death 

in five days, there will be            water. What for, if not to smother or wash out a mouth

before it enters silent?    Moon, moon, keep moving        your fingers and they become a wheel 

beneath the tiny legs of the stonefly. Moon opening, moon closing,          nymph skin crawling over

the riverbed, you like to say it    first. In the mountains, it’s easy to get caught     watching 
 
something you shouldn’t. It doesn’t hurt the snow.




27   The Paris-American

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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

   
   Next week's poets:

 Ilya Kaminsky &   
 Katie Farris
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