Selected poem: Love Poem Three Autumns Later
Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (SIU Press, 2017), winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.
Love Poem Three Autumns Later
In East Oakland, in my temporary flat,
I wash your empty plant pot
at the kitchen sink.
In the dirt, loosened from the crevices,
tiny flecks of sand—the same
slant of auburn as the pot—
I gather and carry them to the lake.
The water is still. The sky
drifts to the left where memory lives.
Forty years a swamp, I say, opening my palm.
Charif Shanahan, “Love Poem Three Autumns Later.”
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