Thrush Poetry Journal
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Carlie Hoffman
​

Beyond the Field
 
I stood in the center

while the blizzard

went on and on. A snowshoe hare

curled near a perimeter of pine

like a closed white hand

and I knew that soon this snow

would erase me. Impermanence

is the first way of knowing the world, the second

a love of it regardless. Beyond the field

there are hills, though it was too

dark to see. There is a pond

where a tern tests the quickness

of water’s weight to anchor him.
 


The dead press the old light of their fingers

along the land-tract of our skin. 

They tell us it is terrible

the way we brighten as we move on.




Carlie Hoffman is a recipient of the 2016 Discovery Poetry Prize. A finalist for the 2017 Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize and the Pablo Neruda Prize, her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes and appear or are forthcoming in places like Bennington Review, Boston Review, Narrative, Nashville Review and elsewhere. She is from New Jersey. Visit her here: https://www.carliehoffman.com/



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