Excerpt from Window by Dorianne Laux

This poem appears in our Fall 2015 Print Issue. The entire issue is available for download in digital format.

if this is how it ends, then let it end, moth

at the window, my mother’s face, shadows

buried in her purse, maw of endless matches

scratched black, useless keys, the worn

leather wallet with its plastic windows

in which we lived, our smiles fixed, our shirts

clean for once, hair combed, faces scrubbed

How she loved to flourish it, opening

on a brass pin like a fan on a deck of cards,

face, face, face, face, face, face,

—

DORIANNE LAUX’S most recent books of poems are The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Facts about the Moon, recipient of the Oregon Book Award and short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also author of Awake, and What We Carry, a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, and Smoke. Her work has received three “Best American Poetry” Prizes, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Laux teaches poetry and directs the MFA program at Noth Carolina State University and is founding faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program. To learn more about Dorianne Laux, please visit: http://doriannelaux.net/