11th Annual Juried Reading: Young Smith

11th Annual Juried Reading Finalist

Young Smith of Lexington, Kentucky

Young Smith completed a Ph.D. in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston in 2003, where he received the James Michener Fellowship in poetry, a Krakow Poetry Seminar Scholarship, and a Donald Barthelme Fellowship for fiction. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kentucky Arts Council. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, American Literary Review, Arts & Letters, Atlanta Review, The Midwest Quarterly, The New Orleans Review, and other publications. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University.

Lunar Isocolon (While Holding Her Breath)

The moon is an eye that never opens.
It is the shell of a mollusk.
It is the head of a match.

The moon is a bladder full of yellow milk
whose skin, at any moment, may be
burst by the needles of the pines,

and the moon is a coin of a small
African nation, crossing a mirror
in a young girl's room.

The moon is the stone of an apricot.
It is the bulb of a tulip.
It is the ash of a cigar,

and the moon is the spiracle
of a breaching porpoise.
It is a grain of barley,

and it is the scar of a pox.
It is a cyst, a saucer, a cervix
of tin, a coil of burning

tungsten, a communion wafer-
and the moon is the head of Orpheus
singing among the waves.

The moon is each of these things-
not in turn, but at once-for the woman
who lies on the floor of a pond,

looking up through the golden mouth
in its surface-where a dragonfly
stands on the face of the moon.

And the moon is her eye under water-
dark with the shadows of craters,
splintered by wings of glass.