a poem by lauren hilger

Awfully


I am in line with something, as when three Andrews Sisters put down their milkshakes
to walk over in sync. A circle hollowed out of the park, a statue, a tunnel of trees, arch.
Even further back. Break up a bouquet. One more glass of water, one more Charleston:
hot, rare somnolence. Again–I want a beginning. NY is for verbs. The bud in a glass of
water, that feeling, that desertscape. As at the end of an Andrews Sisters song,
the sound of a drum
like a piano shutting
quickly that I love.

Lauren Hilger was named the 2012 Nadya Aisenberg Fellow from the MacDowell Colony. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Cortland Review, and Harvard Review Online, among other journals. She is the Poetry Editor of No Tokens Journal.