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Published: Fri Jul 1 2016
Eva Lundsager, Were now like (detail), 2021, oil on canvas
Online 2016 Class Home Loss
Centralia

In candle-lit flickering, you trace
rib’s slope. Your bed
of dark strata, each seam a deeper
face. Not far from here, a town
built on a mine caught fire
fifty years ago and is still
burning. Beneath the overburden
of those other lives—friable surface
where residents of small hope
and coal smoke make peanut butter
sandwiches or bicker, or sing
their coal-tinged lullabies—we move
in upcast shadow. Lampless
and luminous, breath crumbles again
in the smoldering, the bitumen,
the glittering ore body.

Poetry
Altar
Online 2023 Family Home Loss
Poetry
You traveled to the end of the world
by Daniela Danz
Translated from the German by Monika Cassel
AGNI 96 Home Nature Loss
Poetry
Aubade
AGNI 91 Home Loss Youth
Poetry
As Relic, As Remnant
AGNI 91 Class Home Politics

Eleanor Stanford is the author of two books of poems, Bartram’s Garden and The Book of Sleep (both from Carnegie Mellon University Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, The Harvard Review, AGNI, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She lives in the Philadelphia area. (updated 8/2016)

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