A. E. Stallings is the author of three books of poetry: Olives (TriQuarterly, 2012), Hapax (TriQuarterly, 2006), and Archaic Smile (Evansville, 1999), which won the Richard Wilbur Award. Her verse translation of Lucretius, The Nature of Things (2007), was published by Penguin Classics. Stallings received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. She lives with her family in Athens, Greece.
Just as a swarm pours from a hollow rock In one long beeline for the wild thyme, Alighting in clusters on this purple and that, But is stricken with a mass amnesia That disorients the compass of the sun,
Deep in the wood where things escape their names, Her childish arm draped round the fawn’s soft neck (Her diffidence, its skittishness in check, Merged in the anonymity that tames), She knits her brow, but nothing now reclaims The syllables that meant herself.
I teach them to behave just like the rest. They’re marked as absences, take up no room. They only raise their hands when others do. They never speak, even when spoken to.
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