TELL ME GENTLY

                    by Laura Marris 

gray clouds, the sculpted tuba mouth of the north
I met you and now
I am kind to myself in my sleep

and how do you explain that?

The sound a thing makes
is sometimes the sound of the machine
that made it,

the pistons hammering
the train wheels over the tracks
were themselves hammered,

wear at first
so similar to making

the way ice frames the roof
of a small town library--

the clear points lengthening by day

until they break under their own weight

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photo by Matt Kenyon

​Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Yale Review, No Tokens, The Cortland Review, The Volta, and elsewhere. She is a MacDowell Colony fellow and a winner of the Daniel Varoujan Award. She teaches poetry at Boston University where she serves as the Director of the Favorite Poem Project.