"Shadowbox" by Susan Rich

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend October 31, 2017   Shadowbox   Susan Rich

That night the air stank, the stars obscured behind wild horses of clouds. I walked on cobblestones on the edge of something   I could not name: new land of unalterable decisions like a retinue of assassins coming right for me, who kept coming   in a bad dream that dissolved like a black-and-white movie, the dark mouth enveloping the entire screen. The End. Then the aftermath   like a heroin addict waking up in the overgrowth of a river path, no longer young. There are nights that pummel your life, chart   an alternate course unasked for and colorless—the way it was the first time you encountered the one ready to eat out your heart—   an innocent remark—a joke about ocelots or the weeds of purple          carrots. That night I was caught in a before and after, an unsayable horror film   of half-lives as we hipswayed and grunted along the Seine. When someone passed us, their teeth shone like those of a vampire   happy with the waste of the world. Ready to drink it in. My body was four months pregnant, crossing over to a nightmared path   of no return. But isn't this the truth of every moment? To revise our lives into the I belong—to this tribe of the unreliable   narrators, luminous in our stories and in our squalor.            Copyright © 2017 Susan Rich. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "I began 'Shadowbox' during a morning writing session with a friend where we took different end-line words (horses, something, decisions) and wrote toward them. Not controlling which end word would come next allowed for our own buried obsessions to rise up and fill the void. I love the term shadowbox for its multiple meanings, as in shadowboxing with the self or in reference to the dreamlike assemblages of Joseph Cornell where memory and history are juxtaposed to create surreal landscapes of the mind." —Susan Rich   Susan Rich is the author of Cloud Pharmacy (White Pine Press, 2014). She teaches creative writing at Highline College and lives in Seattle, Washington.       Poetry by Rich   Cloud Pharmacy (White Pine Press, 2014) "Dirt Being Dirt" by Carl Phillips "West Virginia" by William Brewer "Diving into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038