Laura Kasischke

Searching the April Ditches

This pale vine, like sorrow, having arrived finally out of great darkness and compression, into wildly applauding light, to die.

This green ballerina blinking, and the trellis tangled around her feet, bleeding.

And the young teacher who was always crying behind her painted mask, forever smiling—

And the couple who would not spend their honeymoon in Room 13, who slept
in one another’s arms
at the side of the road instead.

 

Laura Kasischke’s most recent collection of poetry, Space, in Chains, received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan.