Stefania Heim

from Hour Book

1:58pm

Music fills the space
of distraction and I like it
when I know the words.

The album re-starts but
the space has emptied
I’m the only

one who knows. Return
to the page, re-synch gut
feeling to day,

afternoon I might
have wished for other times.
A couple enters and sits,

one whole side of their bodies
touching, from shoulder to foot.
We love to add constraints

to our lives – like they’re
an outline for all that errancy.
It is 2:14pm.

Maybe you will never
be so together again.

8:32am

When I release her she rolls and balls
Warm
Body against bed

1:47am

Desperation insomniac whiskey

10:25am

Curated accident as governing aesthetic.
Thinking
about truth
as that which will not be erased.

She tries
on angers. She carves out times.
Silence is perceived differently, depending
on its author.
This is so obvious
an embarrassing thought.

Days
are the way
we order our lives.

When I can’t write
I delete
the pieces of what I wrote before.

3:30pm

The exercise of weighing various consoling logics

9:22pm

A woman and child
on the subway platform
call the police.
The man they describe in slow
meticulous detail
is the one upstairs yelling.
They know each other.
A different woman
next to me is visibly afraid.

4:29pm

Some
Storm
Soon
Day
Dark
House

What the worry is like:

10:32am

object permanence
object
to permanence
the ball the home the

Stefania Heim is the author of A Table That Goes On for Miles (Switchback Books, 2014) and a Poetry Editor at Boston Review. Her poems, translations, and scholarly writings have recently appeared or are forthcoming in publications including A Public Space, comma poetry, The Literary Review, and The Journal of Narrative Theory. She has taught at Columbia University, Deep Springs College, Duke University, and Hunter College.