Back to Issue Thirty-Eight

The Certain Body

BY JULIA GUEZ

 

after Vija Celmins

Each taking months
to sand, surfaces made
aware of their own
precarity and also
the miracle of them
being here in this
museum, given all
the forces arrayed
against seeing the
same night so
long, the same sky,
same city of stars
not the same at all
repeating themselves on
this body of water
italicizing across a canvas
meant to remember
the real thing, painted
stones whose stoniness
fix the image in memory.

 

Julia Guez is a writer and translator based in Brooklyn. Her essays, interviews, fiction, poetry and translations have appeared in Guernica, POETRY, The Guardian, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail and Kenyon Review. Four Way Books released her first full-length collection, In An Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also A Frame, in 2019. Her next book, The Certain Body, will appear in 2022.

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