Excerpt from The Thing About the Woods by Emily Vogel

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The following poem appears in our Autumn 2016 issue. The entire issue is available for immediate download.

I don’t want to say what I really want to say. The birds are scarce here, but when one of them is seen moving through the trees, it’s like my daughter’s hand, waving in front of her face in an autistic spasm of delight. I don’t want to say it. The noise in my head has dissolved and become the distant whir of an airplane. I want to say that I liked it a lot in the beginning.

The birds are more bountiful now and the sky appears to be shifting in its own intermittent sunlight. Would this be the beginning? Ever shall be; amen. Let there be no definitive end, let there be no interminable winter, no wailing prior to the sun. And then, let there be no wailing at all. The airplane has traversed, passed over me like a wailing of wind.

Emily VogelEMILY VOGEL is the author of five chapbooks and three full-length collections, including First Words (2015; NYQ Books) and Dante’s Unintended Flight (2017; Nightshade Press). Her poetry, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared widely, most recently in Omniverse and Tiferet. She is married to the poet, Joe Weil, and teaches writing at SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College.

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