Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Recent History
All night, angels
crashed through the trees,
so the yard was a scatter
of bent, failing bodies.
You said: Another! to the crackling of branches.
Their scraps are so sweet where they sway with the leaves.
~
From the garden, the asters said: Love was their weakness.
The firefly’s bright little heart disagreed_._
Then down fell another, where it cracked on a low branch,
waking the neighbors
who leaned from their windows
and peered toward the trees.
~
A crowd had collected
in bathrobes and nightgowns,
their faces lit greenly in the angels’ dim glow.
I’d like to have known them
when they were more vibrant,
you said, looking down,
~
where one gurgled strangely,
its wings come undone.
A child had collected a handful of feathers.
Another threw sticks
at one caught on a limb.
We’d better get digging, our neighbor said softly._
They’ll stink in the sun._
Kevin Prufer is the author of ten books, including the novel Sleepaway (Acre Books, 2024) and the poetry collections The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023); Churches (Four Way Books, 2014), named one of the ten best books of 2014 by The New York Times; How He Loved Them (Four Way, 2018), which was longlisted for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book from an American literary press; Churches (2014), In a Beautiful Country (2011), and National Anthem (2008), all from Four Way books, and Fallen from a Chariot (Carnegie Mellon, 2005). Prufer’s work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, AGNI, The Paris Review, The New Republic, * * and elsewhere. He is Professor of English at The University of Houston, where he also directs The Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to rediscovering great, long-forgotten authors. (updated 10/2024)