Trace me simple-- a figure the children can't not color in, circle of an unsteady hand-- if never more than this flame under the hill, a flowering index, this black dog chasing an atmosphere.
Crayon-lit trunks crush to paper, millenia to sheaves we populate—a simpering June, a julep, some heirloom fear we couldn't look up the picture for, the meaning for.
33 The Paris-American
Timothy O'Keefe is the author of The Goodbye Town, winner of the 2010 FIELD Poetry Prize. His poems and lyric essays have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Seneca Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Athens, Georgia, where he is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Piedmont College