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Claudia Emerson

Claudia Emerson

Early Elegy: Headmistress

The word itself: prim, retired, its artifact
her portrait above the fireplace, on her face
the boredom she abhorred, then perfected,
her hands held upward—their emptiness
a revision, cigarette and brandy snifter
painted, intolerably, out, to leave her this
lesser gesture: What next? or shrugged Whatever.
From the waist down she was never there.

#AmericanWriters

Other works by Claudia Emerson...
Buying the Painted Turtle

Two boys, not quite men, pretended to let it go only to catch it again and again. And the turtle, equally determined, each time gave its heart to escape them. We were near the base of t...
Surface Hunting

You always washed artifacts at the kitchen sink, your back to the room, to me, to the mud you’d tracked in from whatever neighbor’s field had just been plo…
 1
Homecoming

The camera is trained on the door,… in the frame, only the dog sleepin… finally, I see this was to surpris… filming your arrival, the dog’s de… six years distant, can this seem s…
After the Affair

There was no one to tell, so it se… in the lines of the house, in door… In the late afternoons that follow… what could have been someone knock… beat its body against the living r…
 1
Early Elegy: Smallpox

The world has certified itself rid… all but the argument: to eradicate… the small stock of variola frozen, quarantined—a dormancy it has refused, just once, for a woman be…
Fire Drill

Bells sound them from sleep, and t… rise, recite all they have been to… of fire, the beds, nightgowns, the… They’ve practiced this escape befo… and know to close the windows last…
Second Bearing 1919

I have asked him to tell it—how he heard the curing barn took hour… to burn, the logs thick, accustome… to heat—how, even when it was clea… was lost, the barn and the tobacco
Beginning Sculpture: The Subtractive Method

The girls sit before the assignmen… blocks of salt—and from tall, prec… look down into blank planes of pos… though, the only choice is to carv… smaller. So they begin. Rough chu…
Bone

It was first dark when the plow tu… Unsown, it came fleshless, mud-rud… but itself, the tendon’s bored eye… a ponderous needle. And yet the po… of one end dared what was undone
Aftermath

I think by now it is time for the… I imagine the field, the one above… house we rented, has lain in conva… long enough. The hawk has taken ba… above new grass, and the doe again…
Spring Ice Storm

The forecast had not predicted it, and its beginning, a calming, rumb… and pleasant lightning, she welcom… of rain. Then as night came she he… relapse, slide backward into winte…
Frame, an Epistle

Most of the things you made for me… chest, lapdesk, the armless rocker… away to friends who could use them… be reminded of the hours lost ther… not having been witness to those d…
Ephemeris

The household sells in a morning,… they cannot let the house itself g… the near-nothing it brings at auct… the children, all beyond their mid… carry her back to it, the mortgage…
Posessions

I sent you a list of what I wante… of strangers, or for the fire, the… have handled a dead woman’s posses… them, the clothes still fragrant,… of the body. Or perhaps your lover…
The Spanish Lover

There were warnings: he had, at fo… married; he was too close to his m… calling her by her given name, Man… ah, Manuela —like a lover; even he… had bled, even the walls, giving b…



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