Debra Nystrom

Claudia Emerson, who died in December 2014, had come to be known as a poet capable of revealing startling discoveries inside quiet, quotidian circumstances. Her poems are set mostly in Southern rural and small-town scenes, moments in ordinary lives that would normally elude anyone else’s attention.

Muske-Dukes has written poetry, fiction, and essays addressing a broad range of subjects—from John Keats’s “This Living Hand” to Hollywood life on the inside—but what concerns her most is discovering how language used with precision and accountability can effect transformation. 

The land was for bunchgrass, for cattle
grazing against the wind—not color, not
contented gazing. She dragged hoses,

Sure enough, I hear the old
I told you so:
Now that you have a child—

My mother's given up on her dream
of a brand new house. What's wrong
with what we've got, my father doesn't
say, exactly. "Go ahead" is what he says,

Pinned in to the scratchy scarf
and curtain-gown, she tries seeing herself
from a long distance-beyond her parents'

This silver light could dissolve everything
into one substance. Already the borders
of sand and ocean and air are unclear,

These evening hours of blank heat I feel
utterly alone, until the air ripples a bit
and I think of everyone luxuriating in its
 gift
at once, like a congregation. I live, after all,

At rest-hour a rhythmic
faint squink, squink
in the top bunk
farthest from the counselor:

Typing paper and white-out bought, sacked,
and clutched to my breast as if with purpose,
I find myself still shopping: is it the wish to be,
or the feeling of being already no one at all
that lures me through the aisles and aisles of racks
of useless skirts, coats, scarves, and into the little
triple-mirrored, locked and hot-lit fitting stalls?