Danielle Chapman discusses this poem with our critic, Anthony Domestico, on the extended segment of The Commonweal Podcast.

 

For Olivia

Sky blushes upward like Whiffenpoofs or shirred

eggs weeping the gold-leafed hair of Venetian friars

as I accumulate Italy through texts: You craning to sip

espresso on the Ponte Vecchio in last season’s City

Pedal Pushers, your neck’s “Meanwhile” eliding

eight years’ sorrow as this sky sieves cream off plums

like some Master rouging bottoms in a hamam

or girls troubling over which clouds to call horsetails;

Rome, Amsterdam, and God filtering through a pastor’s

meme: Shia Laboeuf rawring JUST DO IT, illuminating

His Most Holy Name upon the pearl ceiling of all

we’re capable of feeling here, in the latest Millennium

of cirrus wiggling rum-warm, orange-foiled bellies

across gaps in the Brutalist carpark as I round and brake,

round and brake down seven levels into New Haven.

Danielle Chapman is a poet and essayist. Her collection of poems, Delinquent Palaces, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2015. Her poems have appeared in the Atlantic and the New Yorker, and her essays can be found in the Oxford American and Poetry. She teaches literature and creative writing at Yale.

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Published in the February 23, 2018 issue: View Contents
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