edge effect by Mikey Swanberg

Image by PN art intern Danielle White, @yourdanidoodles.

Associate poetry editor Sally Geiger on today’s bonus poem: Drawing on the traditions of the pastoral and the ars poetica, Mikey Swanberg uses the power of his line to transform a vision of longing to one of near supernatural union. The poem revels in memory. It is so much more than what we’ve experienced.

edge effect  

last night in the yard 
deer came 

to drink
from the makeshift cold 

plunge    to eat the earth 
so near to me 

I could have reached out 
to rub their backs

I know the body
remembers everything 

licks the pen & takes it down
I know because that's me

going with them 
in the pinking dusk

lowering my tongue
into the cool water

finding it's you again
held in my teeth

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Mikey Swanberg is the author of On Earth As It Is and Good Grief, both with VA Press. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin—Madison & lives in Chicago.