the blueshift journal
blueshift / ˈblo͞oˌSHift / noun
the displacement of the spectrum to shorter wavelengths in the light coming from distant celestial objects moving toward the observer.
A Change in the Wind by Oliver Charles
Photograph shot with Nikon d3100
The Blueshift Journal: Issue 1
Table of Contents
Cover: A Change in the Wind by Oliver Charles
A Real Knack for This by Kay Cosgrove and Lauren Hilger
Cruel Heaven by Oliver Charles
Last Meal by Sally Oliver
The Real/Polly Pocket by Kay Cosgrove and Lauren Hilger
Artist Delving Into Her Craft by Ernest Williamson III
You Have a Poem I Want by Rita Anderson
Carnival Gaffs by Mary Kay McBrayer
Things That Are Blue by Raphaela Posner
Monsters by Karina Chang
Elegy for Birthmarks by Shakthi Shrima
Domestic Ghosts by Sue Hyon Bae
Day Jobs by Jessica Zhang
Summer Boy by Hunter Johnson
It Wasn't Limerick, Ireland by Natasha Moni
from A Field Guide to the Body in Need by Erin M. Bertram
Hidden by Katharina Jung
Liturgy of the Dark Hours by Jay Hopler
adapted from Georg Trakl
How to Treat a Stab Wound by Megan Sims
Mirror by Michelle Devlin
Stillbirth by Megan Peak
Buried Hillside by Sean Patrick Hill
A Real Knack for This
Kay Cosgrove & Lauren Hilger
Trick question, Wisconsin isn’t in it.
Think bigger, triangular,
jugular, think carbolic, it’s dangerous
to ask trick questions, isn’t it?
Faster than you can keep up with,
love and
cardiovascular workouts. I shouted
don’t let me, don’t let me
to my friends but
I let me. It wasn’t me
to lend. Take all the
facts, pump them into shape—
that’s a tricep, innovate. Take this
instant courtesy, please,
this instant heart, the little-known.
Wisconsin is in it. I’m in denial
when the cityscape changes.
My arm pulsing until I’m not
imaginary. Ice-fishing, that’s
a clue. Find the full of my skirt in snow.
It’s caught, like the two of us.
Between two snow drifts
four arms incendiary, I’m sorry
you’re wild as a goose.
Waiting is pain too.
Think of a word like Wisconsin,
what’s very inside? Isolated
twin beds, fireplaces unlit
and still there’s a melodic one left,
me, in the cold.
Kay Cosgrove was the winner of the 2013 Writers Under 30 Contest from The Westchester Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Conduit, and EPOCH Magazine, among other journals. She is currently a doctoral student in the University of Houston's Creative Writing & Literature program, where she serves as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast.
Lauren Hilger was awarded the Nadya Aisenberg Fellowship from the MacDowell Colony, where she was a fellow in 2012 and 2014. Her poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The Cortland Review, DIAGRAM, Harvard Review Online, and Kenyon Review Online, among other journals. She serves as Poetry Editor for No Tokens Journal.
Cruel Heaven by Oliver Charles
photograph shot with Nikon d3100
Oliver Charles’ interest in photography began at a young age, and he has since built a collection of work which expresses the surreal and often dark stages of human emotion. Oliver juxtaposes dreaming and reality by capturing people in dreamlike scenarios but located in natural environments. Oliver is currently based in London, where he is studying digital photography at Ravensbourne College.
Last Meal
Sally Oliver
The Remington Inn was somewhat comforting to me after spending the day in countless business meetings. In the 80s and 90s it was my default hang-out in Texas, the custodian of my tired and world-weary self after having spent the hours pitching new revolutionary cleaning products to a room of mildly hostile faces. The blank faces of the Remington Inn soothed me and the menus, with their garish typography and shamelessly calorific meals, were just the thing to raise my spirits... READ MORE
Sally Oliver has a 1st class BA degree and a MA with distinction in English Literature from Lancaster University. Her short story 'Sleepless Night' has been published in The Flexible Persona in audio format and she won a Global Short Story Competition with Inscribe Media in July 2014. Sally likes to write short stories about ennui, unfulfilled desires and existential emptiness; characters who are in some way disappointed with the banality of their lives and their subsequent refusal to resign themselves to it. She gains a lot of her inspiration from modernist writers such as D.H.Lawrence (who she wrote her dissertation on) and Virginia Woolf, as well as the macabre writings of Ian McEwan. She has most recently been an intern editorial assistant and is presently working towards a career in publishing.
The Real / Polly Pocket
Kay Cosgrove & Lauren Hilger
On my turquoise heart I swear these curls are God-given.
Every room of my house closes.
And every plastic hinge makes a little click when I march through, two-feet locked in
historically, created.
Each click says, I’m the most American play.
Each click opens a room inside of you.
In the game, I’m a vet. In another, I’m in Northampton, Mass,
sitting in a dark room where Emily Dickinson died.
The room is perfectly square. A compact case Emily put in her pocket.
It isn’t my work that lasts. That isn’t the case. Belonging
to a doll is different. Someone immortalizes a room, but the real one falls away.
I’ve won horse jumping competitions.
I’ve been invited to scaled-down White House parties. Enough champagne to fill
half a doll shoe. Enough gifts for all the party guests.
In the game, I’m a lost princess. You turn around while dancing and
see me. Fresh-faced. All of it. I’d shake your hand but that requires
a hand. I’m flattered to be kept so close to your chest. Close in the neat pink plastic.
Privileged to make your acquaintance.
The banquet hall and courting seat, the stable and grand driveway. We can open
to reveal but the plates are glued to the shelves. I get sad when my guests go hungry.
Where one is want for action, one is suffused with magenta and bold, short puffed sleeves.
There are a few options. The first: twist the cherub statue to start
Wagner’s "Treulich geführt."
Twist my arm, no moan will escape. The second: keep inventing.
All this space. Sadly, my copy of Emily Dickinson is only a spine. My library’s a facade.
In the game, I collected them all. I’m material, but I believe it.
Kay Cosgrove was the winner of the 2013 Writers Under 30 Contest from The Westchester Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Conduit, and EPOCH Magazine, among other journals. She is currently a doctoral student in the University of Houston's Creative Writing & Literature program, where she serves as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast.
Lauren Hilger was awarded the Nadya Aisenberg Fellowship from the MacDowell Colony, where she was a fellow in 2012 and 2014. Her poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The Cortland Review, DIAGRAM, Harvard Review Online, and Kenyon Review Online, among other journals. She serves as Poetry Editor for No Tokens Journal.
Artist Delving Into Her Craft by Ernest Williamson III
oil, acrylics, and ink on paper
Dr. Ernest Williamson III has published poetry and visual art in over 500 national and international online and print journals. Some of Dr. Williamson’s visual art and/or poetry has been published in journals representing over 50 colleges and universities around the world. Dr. Williamson is an Assistant Professor of English at Allen University, self-taught pianist, editor, poet, singer, composer, social scientist, private tutor, and a self-taught painter. His poetry has been nominated three times for the Best of the Net Anthology.
You Have a Poem I Want
Rita Anderson
to take a drink of, the one about a porcelain
bowl with soft blue flowers. It belongs
to an aging woman who caresses
the hand of her caretaker: it is
the gift of life, love in the room of death.
How have you been? as scenes fly past
like stations we don’t stop for on our speeding
train, but I miss a mother’s touch and
the sun on the heads of a field
choked with Black-Eyed Susans.
We aren’t doctors, but how we study
the negatives as a way to keep
the hurt from spreading. The past
is a room full of echoes where we cry
out like dogs who have been left in the rain.
I long to learn another trade.
But, your blue bowl—like a tender touch after
the fire’s gone—reminds me that I have
forgotten how to turn out the flashlight,
its beam catching the rafters of my ribs,
my skull. A mirror I can’t escape.
While I can recognize peace: the tolerance of an egret
poised beside a sleeping calf, it is you
who have found acceptance,
that prized pasture dazed with sunlight.
Yours is the steady wisdom of a nature
that has taken root and I lack a planter’s
patience, just as I know I would break
that fragile bowl of yours were it mine.
Rita Anderson earned an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry Emphasis) from the University of New Orleans where she was poetry editor of Ellipsis, the annual literary publication. She won the Houston Poetry Festival, the Gerreighty Prize, the Robert F. Gibbons Poetry Award, an award from the Academy of American Poets, and the Cheyney Award. Her poetry has been published in Spoon River Poetry Review, The Blueshift Journal, Blotterature, Words Work, Transcendence, PHIction, Persona (50th Anniversary Edition), The Artful Mind, Ellipsis, Di-Verse-City: An Austin Poetry Anthology, and Explorations (University of Alaska Press). Her drama, Early Liberty, internationally published at www.offthewallplays.com, is on the publisher’s “Best Selling Plays” list. She can be contacted at her website: www.rita-anderson.com.
Carnival Gaffs
Mary Kay McBrayer
I bounced down the Scrambler’s metal steps and yielded at the bottom, sandals blinking dim pink in the fairground dust. My father’s hand draped over my shoulder directing me to the periphery, toward the games of strategy. The whirling gambling games drew a throng that cried out as the weighted wheel’s clicking slowed. Their illusions of fatal victory enthralled us. I paused. The bend in my father’s elbow deepened. I asked, Daddy, aren’t you going to play that one?....READ MORE
Mary Kay McBrayer lives south of Atlanta, where she writes and plays out the sitcom version of her life in her head. Mary Kay is also a recent graduate of the Creative Writing MFA program at Georgia College & State University, she is an editor at Madcap Review, and her work has appeared in Prick of the Spindle.
Things That Are Blue
Raphaela Posner
Your dad’s 2001 Volkswagen Jetta, in which you learned to drive. You would clutch the thick leather steering wheel until your nails were flush against it as you made ninety-degree turns around the median in the Temple Emanuel parking lot.
Your mother’s varicose veins that wrapped around her feet to the outside of her ankle that make you fear aging. You looked at your feet and saw the blue pathways beginning to raise themselves from the smooth surface of skin.
Your parents’ Joni Mitchell album you found in the basement and played on your green turntable. It was worn, spots of brown cardboard speckling her face. The vinyl turned for you, as it turned for your parents when they first got it sometime between 1971 and 2013.
The backpack you bought at REI with your parents. It was too small for your high school books and so you used it for hiking and going on trips because it had a chest strap and a shoulder strap and it made you feel adventurous. You brought it to college and it fits everything just right.
The Denver sky the morning you left for Rhode Island.
The Providence sky.
Your best friend Katie’s messenger bag you got at Meininger art supply store in Denver that matched your green messenger bag and made you both feel like you were sisters and in on a secret together.
Your TI-84 calculator that you somehow have not lost in the past seven years. It has been a faithful companion as you learned to solve for x and eventually to find derivatives and integrals. All the while teaching you that people and places do not always add up and sometimes you find yourself in the middle of a domain error and you can’t find the source.
The Colorado Spruce trees that line the mountains as you drove near the Continental Divide, where the water runs in different directions and you hiked in the third grade.
The water as you drove near Providence’s East Side and crossed the bridge near India Point, where the crew team rows along the Seekonk River.
The walls of your older sister’s childhood bedroom, where she invented a monster named Patrick to keep you away. She had to say Patrick was on vacation in California to get you to enter when she wanted you to do something for her, like grab a glass of water from downstairs.
The eyes of the only guy you’ve had sex with. His eyes shifted between cerulean and steel. It is the color you have come to associate with pale skin pressed against yours, his royal shirt laying at the foot of your bed. He showed you that blue’s the warmest color when he wanted to be sure that you were okay, that you weren’t hurting. Your feelings for him are blue now, they don’t jump out brightly the way oranges and reds do. Your feelings for him are cornflower blue, forget-me-not blue, blue in the way your throat feels from standing in the cold.
Raphaela Posner is a freshman at Brown University where she plans to concentrate in Literary Arts or English. Her work has received honors from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, including a Gold Key for her senior portfolio, and has appeared in Calling Upon Calliope and in her chapbook Balancing Acts. Raphaela grew up in Denver, Colorado and finds it hard to know where she is without the mountains to use as a compass. She often muses about the relationship between science and art, people and food, and squirrels and trashcans. Eventually she would like to go into medicine and become a physician-writer like many people she admires such as Atul Gawande. She enjoys knitting, dark chocolate, music that makes her feel calm and invigorated, and a really spectacular peach.
Monsters by Karina Chang
digital media
Karina Chang is an aspiring photographer/writer who dreams in between the morning coffees and the midnight ice cream breaks. She first began writing in elementary school, and eventually discovered her love for photography in middle school. Her work has been seen in Silver Quill and [empath]QUARTERLY. Currently, she juggles her passion for art and writing with the pressures of school, often scribbling lines of poetry in her notebooks. An avid fan of slam poetry, punk rock, and rainy days, she tries to combine the bizarre aspects of her life into her art. While Karina doesn’t know what tomorrow will bring, she aims to pour more of herself into each photograph she takes and every piece she writes.
Elegy for Birthmarks
Shakthi Shrima
Daughters spill mothers beneath a faucet,
stuttering, tip whispers down their throats
like fear. Mothers twist rings around hyphenated
fingers, forget absences in soured milk. Outside,
the thrushes are shivering prayers into warm
air. Daughters tear crosses from necks the color
of a knife, gather them in empty cartons.
Mothers draw blinds up like knees, palms
cold and starred against glass, watch the thrushes flap
their arms until they have forgotten them. Daughters
know this. Daughters know the color of mothers’
skins in jaundiced light, know that it is a color
no one says, know the feel of a fist like rosary, cold
and starred against milk skin. Mothers hollow
like a church before the prayer, mothers twist hands
over small scars, mothers say daughters’ names
over and over, begin to clean the sink.
Shakthi Shrima is sixteen, and an alumnus of the Iowa Young Writer's Studio. Her poetry has been published in Polyphony HS and Cadaverine, amongst others, and has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. She can usually be found working on a math problem, rereading Nabokov, or drinking coffee.
Domestic Ghosts
Sue Hyon Bae
When the lights are on
in the empty house across the street
you can see STAY
spraypainted on the walls.
Before someone
told me it was so builders
wouldn't knock down those walls,
a lonely ghost had invented itself.
I don't mean to spook people.
Stay.
And the champagne ghost
in my kitchen. No one's
explained that yet. Sometimes
when it's quiet a wet little
something pops in the kitchen
like a bubble bursting, or the memory
of a bottle uncorked.
As this ghost
is so quiet,
consistent, it is the imprint
of a ghost. The naked baby birds
I found in the stairwell
the morning after a storm
still linger like grease stains
even after someone swept
the dead things out.
The thumbtack holes
painted over. Something
very small lives in there
still.
Sue Hyon Bae grew up in South Korea, Malaysia, and Texas. She is currently studying for her MFA at Arizona State University. Her work has been published in Spires and Silver Birch Press.
Day Jobs
Jessica Zhang
We were haunts of coffee shops and libraries and modern art museums. We floated between alleys and dark streets and convenience stores five minutes from closing. People often asked us what we were looking for, if they could help us with anything. They wanted us to buy our shampoo, or our deodorant, or our can of soda or whatever it was, so that they could go home to their families or televisions or alcohol. But most of the time, we ourselves couldn’t answer. Cashiers couldn’t comprehend why a group of young adults, reasonably well dressed, would window shop at the corner store. Neither could we. But we were up again, bright and early at five in the morning to go to our day jobs. We didn’t call it our careers. We called it our day jobs because we didn’t want it to be anything more. People also asked us a lot what we did for a living. For a living? We mixed drinks, we waited tables, we restocked cereal aisles. For a career? Something much higher, of course. Philosophy. Sociology, occasionally. Most often writers and street musicians and artists of all walks. Always overqualified and overeducated, underpaid and underfed. Alcoholics, but never anonymous. Our names were engraved in every tree trunk of the concrete jungle. Queers, about half. Smokers, almost all. Clichés, even more of us. Once an old man asked us if we were a club of some sort. I guess we did all look sort of similar. But late nights and hollow chests tend to hurt everyone the same. One of us, a girl who was named Brandy and drank the stuff prolifically, told him that we were called the day jobbers. Ironically, of course. The man was almost deaf. The what? He cupped a liver-spotted hand around his ear. The day robbers, you say? What’s that? Brandy corrected him. Brandy for all of us, then, tall glasses and shot glasses and reading glasses. It was sort of the same thing. Our days were robbed. And our hair was loose. And our pockets, too. And our books unpublished, our Pabst on tap. We were babies back then. Somehow, simultaneously, we knew too much and too little for our own good. Another thing we all had in common was that our parents were dead. Dead on the outside or inside. We inherited a lack of breath. A lack of blood. An absence of life. These were our trust funds, which was why we had day jobs.
Jessica Zhang is a writer and full-time student. She has received two Honorable Mentions in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She has completed a summer course in Fiction at Harvard University and is currently participating in the Winter Tangerine Review Writer’s Workshop.
Summer Boy by Hunter Johnson
oil paint
Hunter Johnson is a senior BFA honors student at the University of Mississippi. She specializes in painting but dabbles in digital and comic art. Her work was most recently published in the Berkeley Fiction Review. Hunter has received Gold and Silver medals in the Scholastics Art and Writing competition and the David Rorie Art Award for painting at her university. She has also participated in several art shows across Mississippi. One of her aspirations is to formulate a solid thesis that connects art with optics and astronomy. After her undergrad years, she will likely be found trying to travel into space on a budget and wondering whether or not grad school will be worth the money. She currently resides in Oxford, Mississippi, and works at a summer camp where she spends a lot of time peeling glue off of kids’ fingers and showing them how to draw aliens. You can find more of her work at www.hunterrose.wix.com/hunterroseart.
It wasn’t Limerick, Ireland
Natasha Kochicheril Moni
but Pennsylvania and I
turned the key but the key
didn’t turn the car.
You ran back
and forth across the street
as though you were
conducting a relay with time
but time didn’t listen
and you, with your parts—
question of which
combination, when.
I took to the shade as any
in heat, stood by a tree
that bore apples all meal—
I offered you.
You told me the battery
was what I needed. I told you
to make my car go.
If there was a field
full of corn, then
one of us was the silence
Natasha Kochicheril Moni is a first-generation American of Dutch and East Indian descent. Born in the North and raised in the South, she finds home in the Pacific Northwest. Natasha’s first full-length poetry collection,The Cardiologist's Daughter, was just released by Two Sylvias Press. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews have been published in journals including: Fourteen Hills, DIAGRAM, Verse, Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, and Indiana Review. Natasha's poetry was just nominated for Best of the Net for the third time in 2014 and has also been nominated in the past for Best of the Web. She holds a BA in Child Development from Tufts University, received her Post-baccalaureate medical certificate from Mills College, and is in her third year of naturopathic medical school at Bastyr University. You can find out more about Natasha and her work at www.natashamoni.com .
from A Field Guide to the Body in Need
Erin M. Bertram
“You would let loose your longing.”—Sappho
Everything can break, but that doesn't mean it will.
Molars.
The bones of the face, the forearm, the wrist.
The legs.
Erin M. Bertram is the author of ten chapbooks, most recently Memento Mori, and an excerpt from her hybrid text manuscript “The Vanishing of Camille Claudel” was a published finalist in the 2013 Diagram Essay Contest. The former drummer for the folk rock band Busted Chandeliers, she is a Teaching Assistant and Chancellor’s Fellow in the PhD in Creative Writing program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a member of the Lincoln Zen Center. [erinmbertram.com]
Hidden by Katharina Jung
Canon 5D Mark III
Katharina Jung is a fine-art and portrait photographer from Hermeskeil, Germany. Since February 2013, she converts her daydreams into images. She finished her diploma as a media designer in June 2014, and has gone to travel through Bali and New Zealand with her camera.
Beside photography she loves to travel, exploring new music, play around with colors and brushes. She loves to sew and to create props for shootings.
Liturgy of the Dark Hours
Jay Hopler
In the autumn, in the garden, bitter is the step that dogs the luminous moon.
The enormous night slumps against the icy wall.
O, how sharp it is—, the onset of honest sorrow!
In the twilit room, in the silver flicker
Of a dying fire, drunk on wine and night music, the loner’s thoughts
Bend to ephemera, his black thoughts.
Though their cries are distant, faint, one cannot help but hear
The blackbirds lamenting in the hazel
Bushes.
Liturgy of the Dark Hours. Sinister times.
Who are you, you desolate flute, that these notes of yours
Should go nowhere?
Versioned from the German of Georg Trakl’s poem “Stunde des Grams”
Jay Hopler’s poetry, essays, and translations have appeared most recently, or are forthcoming, in Ezra: An Online Journal of Translation, Interim, Plume, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Literary Review, and Tikkun. Green Squall, his first book of poetry, won the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. His most recent book is Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (edited with Kimberly Johnson, Yale University Press, 2013). His second book of poetry, The Abridged History of Rainfall, will be published by McSweeney's. The recipient of numerous honors including fellowships and awards from the Great Lakes Colleges Association, the Lannan Foundation, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts & Letters/the American Academy in Rome, he is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Florida.
How To Treat a Stab Wound
Megan Sims
1. Leave the stabbing object in the wound. Tell the victim to become familiar with this unfamiliar sensation of having a new guest inside her body. Stroke her hair, say “it will just bleed more if you remove it,” take deep breaths and try not to remember how easily this could happen to you. Try not to think about how thin human skin is. Try not imagine your skin ripping easily like dress seams or book pages off of spines—hold the victim’s shaking hand, tell her she makes a beautiful home for foreign objects... READ MORE
Megan Sims is a 18-year-old senior at the Episcopal School of Dallas. She has been in love with writing since the fourth grade thanks to a wonderful English teacher. This love has paid off, as Megan has been recognized as a merit winner in poetry from the YoungArts foundation, has been published in Polyphony HS, Teen Ink Magazine, The Postscript Journal, and The Riveter Review, and attended the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop. She has also been recognized for photography, performed in plays and musicals at school, and plays the ukulele in her room on a regular basis. Megan was a semi-finalist for the US Presidential Scholars Program, a National Merit Winner, and was the salutatorian of her high school class. Megan will attend Harvard University in the fall where she will attempt to make herself entirely unemployable by studying some combination of philosophy, political science, and writing.
Mirror
Michelle Devlin
Michelle Devlin moved to the United States from the island of Guam during the summer of 2010. She has taken classes with the Art Institute of the Mill Street Loft apart from her schooling at Spackenkill High School ('14). Currently, Michelle attends the Rhode Island School of Design ('18) and plans to major in Graphic Design. Her pieces incorporate various patterns which contrast the fluidity of the human form and remind the viewer of our existence within a balanced universe.
Stillbirth
Megan Peak
Somewhere along Iona and Farm Road 5, my mother stops
the car to slap my sister. The air fills with friction, a brutal
acceptance between seats. I clench my teeth as the sound
bounces off windows. After, my sister—statuesque—tidies
her hair, fiddles with a bobby pin. My mother hovers
over the wheel a moment before starting the car back up.
A new silence fills us—one we’ve allowed or conceded.
The road persists until a shadow comes into view. Steam
rises from the country. No pulsing cloud, no deep fog,
but something darker: a mother. As we pull closer, a swollen
horse outlines the sky, its mane wet from labor. A small mass
curls out from her belly—noiseless. We drive on. Nothing changes
except the trees falling behind us, backward and backward.
Megan Peak’s work has been published or is forthcoming in A cappella Zoo, Banango Street, The Boiler Journal, DIAGRAM, Four Way Review, Muzzle, Ninth Letter, North American Review, PANK, The Pinch, Pleiades, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. She serves as Poetry Editor at OSU’s literary magazine, The Journal.
Buried Hillside
Sean Patrick Hill
Where the animal that will lend me money
Where the animal
who will be reborn my grandfather who carried a rifle through Italy
and came back a quiet, crushed heel
Who will the dog waken when rain rises in the road
Birds in the mountain
and reeds in the pond where children drown among ropes of sunlight
Pollen flowering in air we cannot quite remember
A leaf carried in a millrace built by slaves
I think the birds that lead me to the buried hillside
I think a wind the countryside does not remember
In the hillside, buried, an engine
Under the tongue’s hand some twisted roots, a lug nut, and an egg
and what is born we will bury beside what we wish to keep
a secret
Sean Patrick Hill is the author of a chapbook, Hibernaculum (Slash Pine Press), as well as two full-length books, Interstitial and The Imagined Field. His poems appear or are forthcoming in The Equalizer, The Lumberyard, Country Music, Spork, and Typo. He has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Kentucky Arts Council, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. He currently lives in Louisville, Kentucky.