Fingers in the mouth make mud
into a poultice to warm the dead. Only water moving fighter slow can’t get out til
something goes in, above and below meeting at ice or lotus or iris. Look at me
the way two soldiers paint one another’s skin with wet hands until nothing is left
but the eyes. The dead we burn; the living we bury in our faces.
Beth Bachmann's first book, Temper, won the AWP Donald Hall Prize and Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A new book about war and PTSD, Do Not Rise, won the Poetry Society of America¹s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and is forthcoming from the Pitt Poetry Series. She¹s at work on a collection about peace, called Cease. Each fall, she teaches in the MFA program at Vanderbilt University.
