Issue > Poetry
Dore Kiesselbach

Dore Kiesselbach

Dore Kiesselbach's first collection, Salt Pier (2012), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and contains work selected for Britain's Bridport Prize and the Poetry Society of America's Winner Memorial Award. His writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Boston Review, Pleiades, Plume, Stand and elsewhere. A lawyer in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, he now lives in Minneapolis.

One

As if a thing has broken underground, people flow
up from the subway not having heard anything.  
Someone says there's an airplane
engine in the intersection.  
Someone's had time to put out police tape.  
As if there will be doubt.  
You recognize a face in the turbulence:  
late to work, not one of the go-getters
some of whom have started
lying uncharacteristically down
on the job two blocks away.
You say what you know.
You were sitting at your desk.
There was a lazy flicker
in the lights then wrenching
torsion incident to roar.  
You left the building
to ascertain facts. The fire
is low key and insane,
the hole—simple and clear
as a child's axial drawing of a bird—
shows a final drift to port.  
People overhead are taking
small and lasting steps.
One turned back as if she
had forgotten something.
Gravity's towncar
whisked her away.
When you say people
you're making an inference.
You only speak for one.

 

 

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