Print This PostThe Age
A jar of broken pens and some thoughts
on some obscene rhetoric.
Something eclectic and historical.
My grandmother knit me a scarf,
and she couldn’t stop knitting.
It extends to my ankles.
The air outside is so dark,
that the eye cannot gauge
the distance of its vision.
I imagine a season, when the harvest
is the fullest, most lush and subsisting.
A busy street in the rain:
the flux of radio static.
Something rising, emerging,
something early and unmarred.
Nothing imposes itself upon it.
Tap dancing, as art, as sport,
as metaphor. A neighborhood,
or a philosophy: vastly inconsistent.
Reactive impulse: a fetus, its little foot
twisting. The dark ages in a dream:
something like a trend from 1983.
A home. A sudden hovering of deep blue
in the sky. Yesterday is today
is tomorrow
is today. The difference: a deception,
what the mind wills. There was once was
a lively exchange, in the morning.
One day it will be determined as an entire age.
Documentations will have accumulated.
Someone will be squeamish about squirrels,
like me. A cat will roll over
onto its back, contented
in the afternoon light.
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Emily Vogel’s poetry has been published widely, most recently in New York Quarterly, The Comstock Review, The Paterson Literary Review, and The Journal of New Jersey Poets. She has published three chapbooks: Footnotes for a Love Letter (Foothills, 2008), An Intimate Acquaintance (Pudding House, 2009), and Elucidation Through Darkness (Split Oak Press, 2010). The Philosopher’s Wife, a full-length collection, was published in 2011 (Chester River Press), and a chapbook, Still Life With Man, (Finishing Line Press, 2012). She is the poetry editor of the online journal Ragazine, and teaches expository and creative writing at SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College. Forthcoming, her work will appear in issue four of Maggy, and a chapbook will be released through Main Street Rag’s “Author’s Choice Series” entitled Digressions on God.
