Chamber Music

ISSUE: Winter 2016

Woodwind

This morning your mouth
Was all I could think about

Fiddle

Like a violin you leave
The sweetest

Bruise just beneath
My chin.

Upright Bass

Love that place
Where your hip hits

Your waist
& my head fits

Perfect, rests
Like music

Slide Trombone

All day that scent
In the crook

Of your neck
Distracts

Horns

Woke early, the light
Blues all in my bed

Where I wish
You warmed instead.

Rhythm Section

Without you the room
Grown small—

Only then can I see
How each night we rocked

A steady groove
Where the headboard

Hugged the wall.

Kevin Young

Kevin Young is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and poetry editor of the New Yorker, where he also hosts the poetry podcast. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Brown (Knopf, 2018) and Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf, 2017), which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020. He is a contributing editor to VQR.

Issue: Winter 2016 Volume 92 # 1

Published: January 4, 2016

Updated: January 4, 2016