Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
From the Bones of a Bombed-Out Cathedral
Lord, be
here:
echoic,
austere
as the dead
prayer
still
unaware
that it is
migrant
sound,
blown
out
of the cell
where
you
hid
crouched
Malachi Black is the author of two poetry collections: Indirect Light (Four Way Books, forthcoming 2024) and Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the PSA’s New American Poets Series (chosen by Ilya Kaminsky). Black’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, AGNI, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review, among other journals, and in a number of anthologies, including Before the Door of God (Yale University Press, 2013), The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing [U.K.], 2016), and In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence Press, 2023). Black’s work has been featured in exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad, including in several musical settings, and has been translated into French, Dutch, Italian, Croatian, and Lithuanian. Black is associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of San Diego. For more information, visit www.malachiblack.com. (updated 7/2024)
His AGNI poem “Traveling by Train” was selected by Mark Strand for the Best New Poets 2008.