Anna Journey

Childhood Diorama of a Forgotten Book
 
My red horse has two eyes crowded on one side
of its face—eight years old, I couldn’t fathom the right
 
fish-eyed angle. I can’t remember which
book I tried to illustrate. I only know this shoebox still holds
 
a blue river and a stiff man who stands
on a pine raft and looks as if he has
 
no elbows. His mutant horse grazes
in the foreground. Two trees. Maybe these
 
are the warped shores of Lethe. Box full of silt. God
knows I’ve built underworlds with less: there was
 
the one with a tangled white sheet instead
of a river, from which my insomnia sipped and switched
 
time zones as a joke. There was the oleander that ticked
late into winter with aphids and ached
 
like an old argument. There was the phone call
I received in which he said he knew
 
about the hotel in Denver. When the red horse
bends to drink, when the blond prow
 
hits the shore, the rest of the story’s already
gone and vanished.
 
 
 
 
Anna Journey is the author of the collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Her poems are published in a number of journals, including American Poetry Review, FIELD, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, and Shenandoah, and her essays appear in At Length, Blackbird, Notes on Contemporary Literature, Parnassus, and Plath Profiles. Journey holds a Ph.D. in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston, and she recently received a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California.
 
 
 

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