Charles Rafferty
Charles Rafferty’s most recent collections of poems are The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions, 2017), Something an Atheist Might Bring Up at a Cocktail Party (Mayapple Press, 2018), and The Problem With Abundance (Grayson Books, 2019). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, O, Oprah Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. New prose poems are forthcoming in Plume, Gargoyle, Rhino, and The Southern Review. He has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. Currently, he directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College and teaches at the Westport Writers’ Workshop.
It is like something that died and fell straight down. It reminds me of bones, though it is hard to imagine the animal it came from. Yet there it is, the brass of its bridge pins waiting to be turned. It is the embodiment of music deferred — the sound of a single coin in the pocket of the woman who has always been walking away from me.