Daniel Coudriet
Fair Warning
The carousel operator in backlight, my tuxedo with strings
in the hems, the strings holding her dress.
What the floor blinks I think crosswalk footsteps with sequins.
The inside of my ear angles up, look at the accordion music
seeping out of it, the stains of voices on her legs.
It is the generator hum pumping the distance home
out over the field, someone hammering rust.
We do not live in a parachute.
My Throat Swallowing Makes the Sound Daughter
These clearings where the neighbors build bonfires,
& the mandolin's hot puddles in the backs of my eyes.
We are waiting to enter one of two doors.
I rarely see hair that reminds me of home.
When I meet a rocking chair, I destroy it,
before I add pieces to the fire I dig into the floorboards.
There is a tooth coming in an envelope.
A little girl can be grown with angular water.
Daniel Coudriet lives with his wife and son in Richmond, Virginia, and in Carcarañá, Argentina. He is the author of Say Sand, forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2010. Poems from this collection, as well as from a manuscript-in-progress, have made recent appearances in Verse, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, Fourteen Hills, Octopus, American Letters & Commentary, and elsewhere. His translations of the Argentinean poets Oliverio Girondo and Reynaldo Sietecase have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Massachusetts Review, and Fascicle, among others.
"My favorite front porches are located at 26 Orchard Street (2nd floor) in Northampton, MA, at 1009 Wertland Street in Charlottesville, VA, and at Sarmiento 1370 in Carcarañá, Argentina."
