from Life in a Box is a Pretty Life by Dawn Lundy Martin

February 2, 2015   from Life in a Box is a Pretty Life   Dawn Lundy Martin

Lake, interminable. I do not know where my house is. Where is my house? Summer steams by. Every border is cocked and ready. Flatten body against cool earth. Lie without sound. Be a cool corpse under wire teeth. The police are so young. They do not hear the wailing. Wailing, I’m told, is a figment of your imagination. What to know of the body’s refusal to open, of its hidden cave? Put the cave inside another cave so no one can reach it. Perspiration aches. Strain against dirt walls. I have come to you from a metal house. We had steel barriers to protect us from the sun. The lake drifts into forever. Windows here are small and I cannot see myself in them. What it is to be captured without spoons.            Copyright © 2015 by Dawn Lundy Martin. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “This poem is a part of a larger meditation on human dignity that winds through my new book. What speech does the contemporary moment allow when that speaking or attempted speech regards global displacement, local brutalization, and abject apathy?” —Dawn Lundy Martin   Dawn Lundy Martin is the author ofLife in a Box is a Pretty Life(Nightboat Books, 2014). She is an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh and splits her time between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and East Hampton, New York. Photo Credit: Max Freeman Most Recent Book by Martin   Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2014) "Poem from the Russian" by Jean Valentine "The Throats of Guantanamo" by Katie Ford "What are the consequences of silence?" by Bhanu Kapil Rider Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006,Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.