With Regard

Summer is supposed: an infinite return. Flicker of weed, of the vacillation of things. Between the dulling and sharpening of mind. Mail truck like a heave of responsibility, liability, elegance of junk. Water-log of children’s voices in the heavy sunlight. Indigo of all entrails. Wild humming of insects. My daughter leaping in a blue dress, like something sprung by an ordinary hammer.

Birdsong and dirt of air. Elegance of junk, junk of internal organs. All sorts of sundry vehicles. You, alone with a blue God. A green God. An outpouring of green lawn. Angry dogs ambushing the religious wanderer. The humble quest of the gray and gritty morning.

Neon like an anomaly of what is supposed with regard to the world. God drops dollar bills out of the clouds in a dream. Or dragons. Movie trailer, all structures upheld by the industrial world. I looked into the reflection of a drive-through window today, and my lips looked sad.

The sex of worms, the sex of corporeality. My heft of self.

The rosary at dawn, in a heft of fallen sky. The pallid bluing of it. The wheeling of prayer, of voices. The communion line, the check-out line, a line of verse. My jagged lines of thought. I keep going out into the garage, into the kitchen. And every time, it is the same as before.

Time is the permanence and transformation of skin, all at once. The long tribulation of the sea. You, looking through the city of my brain, through the bones of my face, in a blind search for heaven. Fallacy of wall, ceiling, branch of tree. The eradication of the necessary doing—flight, emancipation, something moving upward into nowhere, lacking the fear of earth’s disguise—the machinery of the only known perspective.

Emily Vogel

Emily Vogel’s poetry, translations, reviews, and essays have been published widely, most recently in the North American Review, Omniverse, Verse-Virtual, Shrew, New York Quarterly, Root Smoke, and Haoajan Press, among numerous others over the course of the past two decades. She is the author of five chapbooks, including Digressions on God, which was selected for the author's choice series with Main Street Rag. She is also the author of a full-length collection with Chester River Press, and two full length collections with NYQ Books, the most recent being Dante's Unintended Flight (composed in Florence, Italy). She is the former poetry editor of Ragazine, and the recipient of the Academy of American Poets’ Prize (Binghamton University, 2008). She has a collection of poetry forthcoming with NYQ Books in February of 2027.

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