Circuits–– you wait for hours while the planets move across your darkness
a small trigger in these sparse hills, the past is crouching, ready to crack
into frenzied barking ; you are attached to it, bound like a “you” to an “I”
a dog behind a chain-link fence which renders you unsightly. A poor sleeper
all raised fur and teeth and mean gums you swear what-happened-to-you was
muscular, feisty, and it charges again and again causing you to lash out. And now
dare you look at these mad eyes? “Good dog,” you say you would like to be
more hopeful, perhaps, less baffled as you try to ease this malady— my lost child?
Leonore Hildebrandt is the author of a letterpress chapbook, The Work at Hand, and a full-length collection, The Next Unknown. She has published poems and translations in the Cafe Review, the Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Harpur Palate, The Fiddlehead, Poetry Daily, and Poetry Salzburg Review, among other journals. Winner of the 2013 Gemini Poetry Contest, she received fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Maine Community Foundation, and the Maine Arts Commission. She was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. A native of Germany, Hildebrandt lives “off the grid” in Harrington, Maine. She teaches writing at the University of Maine and serves on the editorial board of the Beloit Poetry Journal.
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