Noah Warren

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Buildings from the international movement toll
a question in statement form. The ways in
which. We wait. You wait. I keep turning
the handle of this life. I open an oxblood cover
and am dragged down to slumber.
Stammering at a lectern, naked, I observe
my body fissure like a hyacinth. In a sadder one
I have to hold very still, I am for the weather
a tower of bells. Who were those children
I used to play with, that bullied me? Windy evenings
when leaves whirled and the plum tree
rained down plums they pinned me
in the dirt, they needed to be told
their own names. Enter.
                                         Enter. What a murder
of crows has descended on the bristles
of the synthetic field, where the students smoke,
on the blankets and pizza boxes, like so much black dirt.
Once I stood in front of an amber-tinted door
before the bank opened. Hello, teller. I want to save
the rain that lingers in my wife’s hair
a day after we walk. The red garlic and the keys
shining on the windowsill; the hush of opened soil.

NOAH WARREN is the author of The Complete Stories (Copper Canyon, 2021), and The Destroyer in the Glass (2016), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont.