Emily Rosko
THE LENGTHS
after Robert Creeley’s “I Keep to Myself Such Measures”
For as long as I could I kept quiet, long
as I could kept a stone’s weight
centered inside. There was no pain
like the pain planted there: set
off, moss-webbed markers keeping
pace the count. Became so
that language unhinged at each
letter. Became so a body
of nerves stretched between ferocity
and numbness. The brain’s unbranching
tree-form. Jagged flight like the razor-thin
wasps. Breath a sinkhole.
No one could tell me when I turned
into something beyond description.
I held on to no forgetting
until finally all bracing gave.
EMILY ROSKO is the author of Weather Inventions (Akron, 2018); Prop Rockery (Akron, 2012); and Raw Goods Inventory (Iowa, 2006), and is the editor of A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (Iowa, 2011). She teaches at the College of Charleston.
ISSUE THIRTEEN features poetry by Luci Arbus-Scandiffio, Rick Barot, Stephanie Burt, Lauren Camp, Laura Cronk, William Virgil Davis, Chelsea Dingman, Erica Ehrenberg, Robert Fernandez, Gabriel Fried, Tracy Fuad, David Gorin, Jennifer Hasegawa, Stefania Heim, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Ish Klein, Wayne Koestenbaum, Christopher Kondrich, Keetje Kuipers, Anna Leahy, Alessandra Lynch, Alicia Mountain, Allan Peterson, Iain Haley Pollock, Adrienne Raphel, Emily Rosko, Lauren Shapiro, Adrienne Su, Cole Swensen, Tom Thompson, Anne Waldman, G.C. Waldrep, and Stella Wong; fiction by Rachel Lyon and Benjamin Niespodziany; nonfiction by Angela Ball and Joanna Luloff; a film essay by Gustavo Pérez Firmat; and Anne Waldman in conversation with Sandra Simonds.