SELECTED FOR
March 14, 2011 Verse Daily
Web Weekly Feature

Signs

BY Chris Forhan

Spin like this, the pinwheel, aflame in air,
whistled to me. This way to the water,

the half-drowned children sang, sopped things
hauled up blue. Crows screamed, laid siege

to the seeded field. Careful, the wind was careful
not to say, though I was born with a bubble

in my mouth: a harbinger, cardiac in nature.
I will not be glib about this. I gripped her fist

and kissed her. I was implicated. O
weighty world, lush, relentless: amid

your blossoming conflagrations
I understood I would not avert my heart.

 

Biography

CHRIS FORHAN is the author of three books of poetry: Black Leapt In (Barrow Street Press, 2009), winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize; The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars (Northeastern University Press, 2003), winner of the Morse Poetry Prize and a Washington State Book Award; and Forgive Us Our Happiness (Middlebury, 1999), winner of the Bakeless Prize. He has won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes, and his poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Parnassus, and other magazines, as well as in The Best American Poetry. He lives with his wife, the poet Alessandra Lynch, and their two sons in Indianapolis, where he teaches at Butler University.

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