"So Torn by My Tides" by Stefania Heim

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend November 30, 2018   So Torn by My Tides   Stefania Heim

So torn by my tides, I do not know I can read them.   Hour book, our book. "H" in Italian is a tool, not a sound. My mother slips the "h" in only where it doesn't belong. Our book, our book. How events just accumulate in time. Who will we lose in the duration of this writing. The promise of future children named for our beloved dead. Whispered at caskets. An hour dead. How many hours. In our village the streets empty at appointed times. If life were a time-lapse video, lingering would be more visible than slipping away. Invisible motions the more pronounced. Once I stood akimbo, 8PM mid-street, waiting for everyone to go. I am astonished, in memory, by the boldness of it. Did everyone go?                     How many ours.                Copyright © 2018 Stefania Heim. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "I love the homonyms 'our' and 'hour' because their juxtaposition speaks to the ways in which experiences of time are and are not communal. Together they make tangible both the desire for communication and its sometimes productive frustration. When I read this poem out loud, it's not clear which [h]our I mean. What is possible to share with another person? On a more personal level, the word 'hour' is one my Italian mother, for whom the exercise of pronouncing h's is entirely theoretical, has trouble remembering how to say. Like many children who grew up in more than one language, I credit much of my turn toward poetry to my early home life, which transpired in the slippages between tongues—the neologisms, the mistakes, the tactile experience of words." —Stefania Heim   Stefania Heim's most recent poetry collection is Hour Book, selected by Jennifer Moxley as winner of the Sawtooth Prize and forthcoming in 2019 from Ahsahta Press. A National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, she is the translator of Geometry of Shadows: The Italian Poems of Giorgio de Chirico, forthcoming from A Public Space Books in 2019. Heim teaches at Western Washington University and lives in Bellingham, Washington. Poetry by Heim   A Table That Goes on for Miles (Switchback Books, 2014) "Ars Poetica #1,002: Rally" by Elizabeth Alexander "ARE NOT NO TEAR" by Dora Malech "Blossom" by Dorianne Laux November Guest Editor: Don Mee Choi   Thanks to Don Mee Choi, author of Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month's weekdays. Read more about Choi and our guest editors for the year. 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