Poet of the Monthrbdemily stokes, poet of the month, poetry

Emily Stokes: January 2017 Poet of the Month

Poet of the Monthrbdemily stokes, poet of the month, poetry
Emily Stokes: January 2017 Poet of the Month
Vincent Guth

Vincent Guth

My little dream

There is a single terrible distance
[unmathematical, expansive]
between the present and the possible.

One heart loves another beneath a regime of unfeasables
[dappled finch kept wrought]
some chrome regulation, speaker systems

cutting lines in the sand. My little dream
is just a moment where we breathe. 

 

There is no algorithm for imagined memory

but wouldn’t it be lovely if she was standing at the bow in her humble fineries
armed with the shiny possibles of her foredreamt destination? 

Right now, I’m googling it:
how to correctly pass the baton on a 100-meter dash
how to sear a tuna steak just so 

I don’t have to think about the way a hand takes flight
like a cadillac through some tempestuous gated community,
how you tremble beneath the mantle of fabricated memory. 

A set of eyes scanning through the linen closet, too afraid to see
the backlit scroll.  

How a nation turns away.

Emily Stokes received her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and currently serves as the Managing Editor for Madcap Review. Her work has appeared in SLICE Magazine, The Westchester Review, PANK, and Sweet Tree Review. She currently lives, works, and writes in Philadelphia, where her first full-length manuscript is crashing on the couch and looking for a small press to call its home.