Current Issue: Spring/Summer 2011

Essay in White  
George Eklund

A waterfall erased the faces, the rungs,
The crawling stomachs

Girls in white dresses moved slowly in line
To board the ferry that runs
Into a circle of itself

A white spider inched from a wrist
Through a dream
I nudged it with my nose
I scratched myself in limbo

And snapped the legs from a table
And threw them
Across the invisible floor

I would love to float toward your face
In my new canoe
Burning my plans for recovery,
My straw hair, my papered eyes

But the face sags above its decoy
In a lyric from any century

Shop keepers executed in the snow,
Their children asleep in the roots of trees,
At the bottom of a lake
In dreams of pipe smoke
And white aprons.

 

George Eklundhas taught at Morehead State for 18 years. He graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop and has published in many journals including American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Epoch, Fence, and many others. He's published three chapbooks and has a book length book coming out with ABZ in September 2011.