Housatonic River moves slow,brackish water congealed from cold.Streetlight’s titian hue seeps through the window pane—my eyes glazed and face swollen with sleep.An American flag hangs on the wall,and tin soldiers march across the dresserbathed in red light from the router,dirtying the primary colors of my youth.I’m awake when I shouldn’t be,and the hallway’s bifurcations multiply.Gloucester Harbor—Blynman Canal; Stage Fort Park; The Boulevard.I gaze out at Ten Pound Islandpast Eastern Point to the whitecaps.(Where gulls are babbling.)From mono to biphasic sleep,my second sleep, where dark Manhattan towers loomenmeshed with smoke and onyx sky.My second sleep, where red, white and blue are burning,the ashes gleaning and glinting as they die.I wake to the carmine rays of dawnand fall asleep to the sound of fireworks outside.I cradle the ivory dove in its mourning,whispering, “Am I alive? Am I alive?”
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About the writer
Casey Stevens. Casey is a poet, translator, and aspiring scholar. He is currently a Ph.D. student at Cornell University studying premodern Chinese literature. He seeks to blend his interest in the imagistic poems of the Tang dynasty with his own poetic works. Ephemerality, tone, and spatiality play a prominent role in his poems which attempt to plumb the interstices of our contemporary world that so often moves at a pace which is prone to neglect both present and past.
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