EMILY BARTON ALTMAN

Score for Invasive Species

1.

My body opens—a wider sea
for drowning

2.

What teaches me—grief
in its unbent fury keeps my eyes
open, and you moving through them

Score for Remapping

 

Suddenly                                                          it’s like we are

in the city again. Mornings are                   less filmy, here. Watch,

the shadows                                                    silver across the day.               

I don’t like                                                       time. You could let it go,

echoing along, and still it will                      hurry us, too.

Force accumulation.                                      I only leave a room when

the light closes, and                                       I am done with it.

I don’t know                                                    how to return, know

there isn’t a way.                                             I look for it anyway. The manner

we took for granted.                                       The difference

we overlooked.                                                But I want to stick to

the story. Maybe,                                            the return is a stillness.

Maybe it’s a lake. I reach,                             pretend I still have

an architecture to mask.                               I speak too fast            

when I think about it.                                    Reveal too much.

I layer                                                                in my own

mind, slicing it thinly                                     filtering it through glass. I have lost

myself in this haunted place, looking         for the city.     

When I remind you of it                                you agree.

Landscape with Palisade

A  borrowing / from French / a raising / wooden

pales /  to  form  a  fence / a thing / resembling /

columns along  the  Hudson / similar / elsewhere

/ a dune / is only one kind / of fortress / a lake /

what  is  it  /  we  want /  to  keep  /  at  bay / our

damage / already / seeping through

Rewilding


My skin shed in water
in remote summer

an antecedent
to my shape, a bright wave

held its vastness
an answer to my palm.

My lungs fill
with late afternoon

the way water
continues to open

and the woods a closing
my mind slowly comes to rest.

I burn
dune grass

in the open sand
I want to shed my mind

and let the landscape
claim

all of the space
larger than my head.

Score for Approaching Winter


In the dark I                                            move east
                                                                   watch the light fade,
surround me,                                          usher
in early night. Once I told you
to look up, so I                                        look up.
I try to                                                       focus
my mind on my breath
                                                                    move quickly
through the cold.


This cold could be that cold, this night
could be that night. I have nothing left

to spare anymore—                                 keep moving
until the dark moves before me.

Emily Barton Altman is the author of two chapbooks, Bathymetry (Present Tense Pamphlets, 2016), and Alice Hangs Her Map (dancing girl press, 2019). Recent poems are forthcoming or appear in Bone Bouquet, Gigantic Sequins, The Iowa Review Online, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a Poets & Writers Amy Award and received her MFA from New York University. She is currently pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at the University of Denver.