from Umbels

POETRY
Written By Iris Cushing

By Iris Cushing

In the winter, there were days in which

I never stepped outside. Enclosure

in nourishment and texture. Kitchen,

soft bed, warm water, wood carried up

from the basement to the fireplace.

A day when, your node newly rooted

in me, I couldn’t get my car out

of the snow piled beside the road.

Now the turn from night to day becomes

porous. The windows always open.

When it rains, your father and I take

off our clothes and run in the high grass.

Our skin lets the world into your house.

Iris Cushing

Iris Cushing is a poet, scholar, educator and founding editor for Argos Books, an independent poetry press. She is the author, most recently, of Into the Long Long Time: How Mary Korte Saved the Trees (Ink Cap Press, 2019) and The First Books of David Henderson and Mary Norbert Korte: A Research (Ugly Duckling Presse, forthcoming 2020). She lives in the Western Catskill mountains.

Previous

Essay on Beauty
Next

Bruce Smith & Hunter’s Poetry MFA