Mary Crow
This Is a Test: Fill in the Blanks
Do you know how I can get to the other side of the river?
On the other side of the river, the last party had just finished visiting the profitless locale.
“The broken bodies stand by the river and wait. . . .”
I waved at them and they waved back when what I wanted was for the ferry to come back and carry me over.
I needed to escape the starving regions.
[So the ferryman] pointed to the line the refugees stepped over and said: ‘That’s where the country begins.’
Or this river forms one border of a country.
But I still need to cross over.
“. . . he told me to go to the river and ask to be put on a boat.”
Desolation Canyon. Separation Rapid. Lava Cliffs. The boat will pass them all.
On the other hand, dynamiting the air has not induced rain to fall, unfortunately.
“Each to his grief, each to/ his loneliness and fidgety revenge.”
“Poet your favorite poet from now on is my boot.”
“On this side of the river, in a package of minutes there is this We.”
“. . . it is now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds, if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can . . . .”
Mary Crow is the author of three chapbooks, three full-length books, and five volumes of poetry translation. Her poems have appeared in journals including American Poetry Review, New Madrid, Hotel Amerika, A Public Space, Interim, Poet Lore, Denver Quarterly, Illuminations, Cimarron Review, Indianola Review, Wisconsin Review, and Tulane Review. Her awards include poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Colorado Council on the Arts as well as three Fulbrights. For 14 years she served as Poet Laureate of Colorado. Crow is retired from the faculty of Colorado State University’s creative writing faculty. She lives in Fort Collins, Colo.
SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.
If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value the What Rough Beast series, please consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.