Tuesday poem #116 : Beth Bachmann : privacy

How much harm can entering

do? One cell, two,

and the whole law is broken in –

leg after leg,

the myrtle presses itself up from

the ground:

stampede. Horse, horse, horse, horse.

What are you turning

into? Inside me you murmur so much

pain so much

suffering. What makes the horses go

like that – fear

or fire? Circle me. What kills us is

not crush, but push.

Beth Bachmann's first book, Temper, won the AWP Donald Hall Poetry Prize and Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A second book, Do Not Rise, winner of the PSA’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award is out from the Pitt Poetry Series in January 2015. She holds degrees in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins and Concordia University in Montreal and teaches in the MFA program at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Find her @bethbachmann.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan