The street grew only strangers. All the faces we were wore slings. An ingrown arena peered out from our sigh. We spread ourselves out to feel the glass in a crowd. We prayed to a dog, then some flies. Our solo was a burning zither, not a kite.
Copyright © 2017 by Eric Baus. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 30, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem begins in the form of a walk and ends up somewhere else, in a weirder middle distance. It assembles a song from small acts of recognition, gathering a chorus. I wanted to play a landscape as if it were an eroding instrument rather than try to freeze one scene in time.”
—Eric Baus
Eric Baus is a graduate of the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the PhD program in literature and creative writing at the University of Denver.