The body—god box—holds
the stuffing, blunt-winded plot,
until it doesn't
tissue of tiny details
soaking up gestures of wedding
parties, neurons, steering wheel,
sugar bowl, the solarium
the nectar ebbs from the design
an autopsy, the openings filled with liquids,
already locked-out of the house, embarrassed
The river bank has been dented—
material ghost, the knees lock-kneed, knee-deep
What is left is fact and its antihistamine
Carry it to the river and drop it in. Watch it give in
like a vocabulary greased, the fish unlocked by their own
removable beauty
Echo the ocean of you when you (carrying the description)
are gone. So swam the surplus, blindingly bright, away
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Dawn Losinger's poems and lyric essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, New Orleans Review, Best New Poets 2010, and elsewhere. "Knee-Deep" was published in her collection Whelm, which won Lost Horse Press's 2012 Idaho Prize in Poetry.
Dawn is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, Smartish Pace’s Beullah Rose Prize, and four Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. More recently she was a finalist for the Kenyon Review Fellowship, won the Scowcroft Prize (chosen by Lidia Yuknavitch), the Utah Writers’ Contest in prose (chosen by Susan Steinberg) and poetry (chosen by Wayne Koestenbaum), an Academy of American Poets Prize, runner up for the Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Award (chosen by H.L. Hix), three Utah Arts Council Writing Awards, runner up for The Bat City Review Art & Writing Collaboration Prize (chosen by Tomaž Šalamun), and was selected by Claudia Emerson for inclusion in Best New Poets 2010.