Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet

Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet Poems

A hot day and a woodpecker carves away
at backyard aspen, the dog's ear swiveling
like a tiny satellite dish: pinpoint,
lock on. Morning and the neighborhood
...

and I go

down into it, the hall again
(streetlights, blinds)
...

It is only the space between stars.
Only matter, falling away from itself:
...

4.

than one, or two, or
enough that counting doesn't help:
a million poppies, a million rats.
...

Maybe there could have been
another life that led us here,
where we ended up:
...

The longer I know it, my husband says, this place,
the worse I know it is—the ruined,
the once. Paradise once (we think), and still
the hills, the bridge: some perfect gleaming headway,
...

Outside rained over the tetherballs,
but here I held the world. The joy
of getting it down, down right,
the sharp purple scent of page
...

The build-up, the accretion and you wonder
why you ever bothered, all the little objects— why not
a perfect silence, a white sheet: cool and opalescent,
...

out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord
—more like out of the middle, the soft
chewy center of here: the mailbox,
...

Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet Biography

Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet (born January 31, 1968) is an award-winning American poet. Stonestreet's second book, The Greenhouse, was awarded the 2014 Frost Place Chapbook Prize and published by Bull City Press in August 2014. Her first book, Tulips, Water, Ash, was chosen by Jean Valentine to receive the 2009 Morse Poetry Prize, and it was published by Northeastern University Press. Stonestreet is a graduate of Yale University, and she received an MFA in Creative Writing from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College where she received the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship[2] in Creative Writing. Her poems have been anthologized in Best New Poets 2005 and Best New Poets 2006 (Samovar Press), and they have appeared in literary journals and magazines, including The Iowa Review, Bellingham Review, Blackbird, and Third Coast. Her honors include fellowships from Millay Colony for the Arts and Vermont Studio Center. She lives with her husband and son in Oakland, California, where she works as a writer, teacher and editor.)

The Best Poem Of Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet

Spring Forward

A hot day and a woodpecker carves away
at backyard aspen, the dog's ear swiveling
like a tiny satellite dish: pinpoint,
lock on. Morning and the neighborhood
rotates around that point, springing taut
toward equinox. Little flashes call out to those
who can read their language but glitter
for everyone, the planet an ear in a swirl of sound.

In one photograph teletype operators
sit at the alert, collars buttoned high, each finger
rearing back over a single shining key,
each key lit from behind: lone lamppost
spilling glint across filigree and pomade,
skimming even wrought iron with a sheen
of pale sand. Sending it outward,
out here where we keep our images mobile.

That lost hour went somewhere, surely—
out there ready to bank back home
one October midnight, deeper into this
flattened century. Some half-full moon
of the future, and under it a wind-up bird.

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