Christopher Emery
Christopher Emery has been teaching at Arizona State University since the fall of 2008, where he earned his M.F.A. in Creative Writing. He has worked as a teaching assistant, faculty associate, and an instructor. Mr. Emery is honors faculty on the Downtown Phoenix campus and has served as a Personnel Committee Representative for Languages and Cultures. You can find more of his poetry by visiting VCU's Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts (vol. 15 no. 1).
The Difficult Night Window
The clerk was singing a homily of rest
as keys from the empty rooms swung from hooks.
A woman gets stuck under something else human
as the town's children pass in blouses under banyan trees.
A little girl skips under the stars.
To her they are just ice,
in the morning she will hug a horse after it’s beaten.
When is the jaw ripped from nothing?
A circle of condyles in an old lawn that dogs peed yellow and dry
is the key evidence of mischief in the stories of kids.
Everything looks dead in the sun.
The farmer just heard sounds, or enough, or god.