by Evelyn Hooven (December 2016)
Former companion,
You are not
Who I thought. . .
Yet no use, none
In refusal
To admit
A difference still—
Your voice, how
It seems with you—
Those shadows
Approximations
Hold and follow—how
Are they made, nerves
I mean, what are they?
Are you ever
Sad or void
Absented from
Is it some shape
You once called
Love and struggle,
Or from knowledge
Of that shape
Instead of
A trailing off? . . .
Traces
Frail, persistent
On an indistinct
Horizon—
Creatures
Nearly present
Nearly explosive—
What are they?
There are
Have been
Explanations
Too many
So none
Quite true
And happy
New year
To you, too.
____________________________
Evelyn Hooven graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received her M.A. from Yale University, where she also studied at The Yale School of Drama. A member of the Dramatists’ Guild, she has had presentations of her verse dramas at several theatrical venues, including The Maxwell Anderson Playwrights Series in Greenwich, CT (after a state-wide competition) and The Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge, MA (result of a national competition). Her poems and translations from the French have appeared in ART TIMES, Chelsea, The Literary Review, THE SHOp: A Magazine of Poetry (in Ireland), The Tribeca Poetry Review, Vallum (in Montreal), and other journals, and her literary criticism in Oxford University’s Essays in Criticism.
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