Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize Honorable Mention, selected by the NEPC Board
For An Astronomer’s Daughter
Before this world,
we passed through clouds of others.
A world’s hand stopped, as if still holding
a dropped phone.
Starry flourishes that can’t be read when we look toward them,
that don’t see us when we look away.
Slopes of pumice underfoot, and pumice in air scraping lips
down to first and last wishes.
Worlds in which I looked for you
and worlds in which I drank from you.
Middens of matter, a dense nothingness in them,
and spectra that luster along mothers-of-pearl.
Worlds of eye-deep islands in a coffee cup.
Shore-shimmer shining so many ways.
Broken liquid worlds that say, Bring water in your hands.
Bays torn white by a turbulence of dolphins,
bays torn blue by the two-hooked moon.
Dust of horizons crossed, billow-mist passed under.
What I call to you in this world I must
recall from some other.
Light gives a little shudder
just before I say your name.
Mitte
By the time the company reconfigured the work plan, I was too old to use any of my skills. But I went along looking for another pile of trinkets, figuring my pockets were hardly full.
When we got to Berlin, the streets were so torn up that the night was a stumble through a coal pit, the holes leading only to holes.
I fumbled to repair an underground switch, which, no matter what you pushed, snapped every light on, like some harsh accuser who cannot remember what you did, but knows you were the worst man in Germany.
There was no fixing the light, but I told folks I might have, and though pasts come back, memories might change.
My trip report is most accurate listing what I didn’t see, like the World War II bomb they defused at the main train station while repelling my taxi into long, looping detours. I fell asleep once, crossing blocks of dotted-line borders, but I remembered the whole thing.
Section 3: “Missing at the Pergamon Altar—a giant’s neck trampled by a sandaled foot, a tensely twisted seagod’s gut, the heart-crushing way I was once in love with a headless goddess on a legless horse.”
By the time I’d written this, I had nothing left. A balloon brushed my nose where I slumped in the park. I cried over babies while grinning like a grate and stared at a cart with glassed-in cheese. Construction was quiet; it must be Sunday. They brought me a hunk of grass frozen together like a bouquet and said: perhaps your family once lived here.
Drishti
And my mouth overflowed with yogurt and minted honey.
But then a future came:
trees falling on street corners and on the schools,
salmon-crushing trees in heavy seas.
Postures of dislocation, despair, immolation.
The burning of bonds to free my heart into the air,
a red powder and a blue and a yellow.
Mazes made from the flight of sparrows
out of sharp, falling branches.
I counted backward through the rooms of the tall building
where daily I’d skittered, hoarding and lizarding.
I removed my neck from the subway tracks
because the train was never coming because the tunnels
overflowed—milk and slow nectars had swallowed the wheels—
and I could see beyond the platform the trees on fire
that broke open the windows, the order
of things—trunk halves, root casings
Acknowledgements: “For An Astronomer’s Daughter” was originally published in The Kenyon Review; “Mitte” in London Review of Books; and “Drishti” in The Missouri Review.
Paul Nemser’s book A Thousand Curves (2021) won the Editor’s Choice Award from Red Mountain Press. It is a collection from a lifetime of writing poems. Nemser’s poems appear widely in magazines, including AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Kenyon Review, London Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Plume, and TriQuarterly. He lives with his wife Rebecca in Cambridge, MA, and Harborside, ME.