Glow is Due Mainly to the Presence of Dinoflagellates


Stacks of profanity dry on newspaper
while light disappears from eyes
voices green unguarded


cradle wolves or walk
into symphonies repeatable
by virtue of technology


The wolves and the walking
and the sun falling are never


facsimiles though they resemble
their sisters
 

 

 

Of Derelicts and Wreckage


One card for each question
fool, star, magician


Who are you; we who
worry return


Paint what we cannot say
love of the objectionable


is another form of silence
grown so many hands
 

 

 

 

Laynie Browne is a poet, prose writer, teacher and editor. She is author of thirteen collections of poems and three novels. Her most recent collections include a book of poems You Envelop Me (Omnidawn 2017), a novel Periodic Companions (Tinderbox 2018) and short fiction in two editions, one French, and one English in The Book of Moments (Presses universitaires de rouen et du havre, 2018). Her honors include a 2014 Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award (2007) for her collection The Scented Fox, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award (2005) for her collection Drawing of a Swan Before Memory.  Her poetry has been translated into French, Spanish, Chinese and Catalan. Her writing has appeared in many anthologies including The Norton Anthology of Post Modern Poetry (second edition 2013), Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2013), Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006) and The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008). She teaches at University of Pennsylvania and at Swarthmore College.