for Langston Hughes who grew up off the interstate in Lawrence, KS
The sky is large driving out of Kansas.
February phantom gray.
Iced-white fields for miles—trace of power station—exits
trancing by.
Alone in my car can snow
hear me?
Searching across for what has been lost.
My disjointed lines at the verge of silence where frozen hills
tilt into blankness.
Kaw River crooks & turns.
A skein of geese is a dark arrow,
a point in the distance
between ineffable
& self.
I open my mouth & the wind enters.
Trees tall ghosts in sleet & smoke.
All of us in our wet coats like tilted trees.
Park flickering silver-green through the window.
Shoulders, satchels, bark-brown
paper bags, damp caps, lidded cups of amber liquid.
News of the wars everywhere.
The metal bus staggers Manhattan.
Lexington, Malcolm X, Saint Nicholas—
Across to the Hudson where blacktop erases
to loam & branches.
Carrying us. Water sliding.
Heartwood running the spine of the Tupelo.
A man dangling an unlit cigarette.
Me in a body slanting on the closed door, by now you know I clench
a book.
News of the wars everywhere.
You in the future who is reading
this,
you, future traveler
will wade
in your tallest boots in the tall wet grass.
Rain that folds in waves as the sea.
A wounded deer – leaps highest
I’ve heard the hunter tell
—Emily Dickenson
The first time I fell hard
for love I was a poem
turning in the sky.
Leaves turn sunlight to sugar
then drop from the tree,
slanting [like Emily]
deliriously
down.
—
Once I jumped
from a rowboat to a death
into the glittering wind.
Lake Erie ghost cold &
dark with Chokecherry twigs.
Novembers,
we tripped the 9-Mile Road
iced brick under the violent trees
falling for the bad guys,
Julie & me slipping
into the Michigan night
in ruby leather thigh highs, eyes
frosted wide & pretty.
We kept our wounds
secret.
And now—the unburying
of it all.
A leap into the red giant
stars that are poems
that are fields of leaves
covered in perilous hoarfrost.
—
All I ever wanted
was to fall.
Bonnie Jill Emanuel is the author of Glitter City (Cornerstone, 2024). Her poems and interviews most recently appear in The American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Pine Hills Review, RHINO, and more. Emanuel earned an MFA from The City College of New York where she received the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing and the Irwin & Alice Stark Poetry Prize. She was named a finalist in the Frontier Poetry 2024 Ekphrastic Contest and for the RHINO 2025 Founders Prize for poems from her newest body of work. Born in Detroit, she lives in New York.
A series of woodcuts from an 18th-century chapbook entitled The World Turned Upside Down or The Folly of Man, Exemplified in Twelve Comical Relations upon Uncommon Subjects. As well as the amusing woodcuts showing various reversals (many revolving around the inversion of animal and human relations) there is also included a poem on the topic. The chapbook is reproduced in the wonderful Chapbooks of the Eighteenth Century (1882) edited by John Ashton, which brings together hundreds of facsimiles of 18th century chapbooks upon a huge range of subjects.
See more at https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-world-turned-upside-down-18th-century/
