Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
At First
Dressing my body
to see you—spiraling:
breath and sea skitter by.
Wind knocks at the window,
stamping hooves, making fun.
October’s the month to marry.
Without a skip in the beat,
I feel my heart behind
my breasts, close, closer.
I am spinning, spinning
when the doorbell rings,
then down three flights
a whorl of speed whirling
through the vanished door.
Elizabeth Rees is the author of Every Root a Branch (Codhill Press, 2014) and three chapbooks: Tilting Gravity, winner of the Codhill Chapbook Award; Now That We’re Here, winner of the Spire Press Chapbook Prize; and Balancing China, which won the Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Prize. She was a finalist for Nimrod‘s 2018 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Her poetry has appeared in The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing and literature at Macalester College, Boston College, Boston University, the U.S. Naval Academy, and Johns Hopkins University. In addition, she has served as a consulting writer and editor to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Smithsonian Museums’ Travelling Exhibitions, and PBS. She works as a poet-in-the-schools for the Maryland State Arts Council and conducts poetry workshops for adults at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. (updated 10/2018)