Somerville Poet Amaranth Borsuk.

Somerville Poet Amaranth Borsuk is the author of Handiwork (Slope Editions, 2012), selected by Paul Hoover for the Slope Book Prize, and, with programmer Brad Bouse, of Between Page and Screen (Siglio, 2012). Her poems, essays, and collaborations have appeared widely in print and online. Currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT, she will join the faculty at the University of Washington Bothell this fall.

History of Sand

Palmed long enough,                            one no longer

feels  the  stone

but air shaped to the                             gone weight of it.

A  new  wound

like the old come back                   stretched as a drum.

We  didn’t  know

what we did, no, or                               seldom, didn’t we?

So  emptied,  so

pine, so breach. Bent                             back this way,

one might recall

where light hurt itself                            on each object

that  broke  its

fall. One might press                             one’s hot face

to  the  past

like  air—one  might                             outlast.

– Amaranth Borsuk

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