Choir

ISSUE: Winter 2014

I once believed in heavenly clarity—
do you know how good it feels to sing
of certainty, the wild apricot
of the heart orange, large, full of reach
at day’s unlatch?
Inside the mouth, certainty
is a fruit breaking apart.
That is how good it feels:
We would have despised anyone
to keep our song.

Katie Ford

Katie Ford is the author of four books of poems: Deposition (2002), Colosseum (2008), Blood Lyrics (2014), and If You Have to Go (2018), all published by Graywolf. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Partisan Review, Poets & Writers, and Pleiades. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.