• HOME
  • ISSUES
  • ABOUT
  • SUBMIT

FOUR WAY REVIEW

Carlie Hoffman is the author of This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021). Carlie's second poetry collection will also be published with Four Way Books in 2023. She is a recipient of a 92Y/Discovery Poetry Prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award. Her poems, essays, and translations have been published or are forthcoming in New England Review, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, AWP: The Writer's Notebook, Los Angeles Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere.

TWO POEMS by Carlie Hoffman

Wednesday, 15 April 2020 by Carlie Hoffman

ELEPHANT IN THE MIND

 

You grieve in the bathroom brushing your hair

while elephants roam the black sand.

 

It is August and you love someone.

The elephant’s ear, God’s hand.

 

What’s gone shimmers.

Goneness: opal as a tusk.

 

You hear the flags of the world 

shiver every way in the wind, 

 

elephants among the wild vines, 

the olives shining.

 

 

UNGENESIS

 

I was young, a myth, chewing 

the apple. I slept in a hemisphere 

of coats pushing out of the flames. 

Every city burns, I know, 

though I’m not a mystic.

There are so many ways to be 

betrayed by a country—

My ancestors—goat bones, 

stars in the butcher’s thumb. 

They live in the milky river 

that surges through the mountain 

burdened with our names.

 

Read more
  • Published in Issue 17
No Comments
TOP