Nancy Kuhl
Wedding Party
Such a letter of human history, a song and
the whole town singing.
The bride is luxury
and utility she is
the synonym of sex.
She aspires to want nothing
not a window or tower not paintbrushes
not a slip bolt- lock. She is newly
indulgent: I had red hair and what
was I going to do with that? Newly
sacred. To marry is twin and
tangle. A clear plastic bubble cups
each pill hormones suspend
further mystery.
In this city it rains even
in the hallways
of fine hotels. She thought
she’d move toward
the skyline
some inevitable next.
Off at the Hinges
Blue in this light, trees
go sky wild, are good
enough. An odd illness
out of season. Stay
at the edge of the day. Will
have to do. The corner
pine drained of sap, handfuls
of grass; yesterday
forgotten. If you’re like her
you some days wake to a mirage
of suburban lawn girls, kaleidoscopic
sprinklers’ turn and tick. The door
is off at the hinges and she
won’t do a thing about it. Not
just now is a remedy; come
on in before the streetlights some-
thing else. Voice, bluster and
hitch, can’t find its objective.
Name it. Better than her
handful of blades. What
she leans into. Not
the unspecified apprehension,
its muddy taste. No.
The shadow that locates her.
Nancy Kuhl’s chapbook, In the Arbor, was winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published by Kent State University Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Verse, Fence, Phoebe, Puerto del Sol, Cream City Review, The Journal, and other magazines. She is co-editor of Phylum Press, an independent publisher of innovative poetry. She is the Assistant Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
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