• Arm In The Excavator's Shovel

    Shane McCrae

    Spring 2021

    The excavation ripples through the body

    The skeleton in dirt the  dirt at certain

    Depths relative  to the skeleton corre-

      sponds to the shape  of the living person


    Thus anyone  with the right coordinates

    Could dig the shape of the person from the dirt

    But made of dirt  but with his skeleton

      Inside it would it  be an it


    When cradled  in the living arms of the worker

    Because no  excavator has yet been

    Shane McCrae's most recent books are Sometimes I Never Suffered and The Gilded Auction Block, both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

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    Stanzas: Joseph Brodsky

    Ange Mlinko

    Looking at stanzas in a foreign alphabet, like Russian, is a reminder of the inherent beauty of the form as it patterns the blank page. That too is an optical illusion—it tells you nothing of the quality of thought in that foreign language—but it’s a start; it makes you want to know.

    Instructions

    Austen Leah Rosenfeld

    Start with description.
    Talk about the dark of the desert, the way the stars are grooves cut by ice skates.
    Pretend it was November.
    Decide that the wind came from a storm in the sea.
    Imagine your mother was asleep, dreaming about foxes.
    Tell us that a slot machine is just a night-blooming flower.

    To Our Miscarried One, Age Fifty Now

    Sharon Olds

    Every twenty years, I turn
    and address you, not knowing who you were
    or what you were. You had been three months
    in utero, when our friend came to visit
    with her virus which I caught and you died—or it may be
    your inviableness had been conceived with you—
    you might have been, all along, going to
    last fourteen weeks, though I had felt,
    as we lay on the living-room floor, the couch
    pushed in front of the door at the pure gold
    hour at the core of your big sister’s
    nap, that you had taken deep.

    Contact

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    931-598-1185
    sewaneereview@sewanee.edu

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