Open Letters Monthly

View Original

Alaska Epithalamium

Love punched my brains out likeArtie in the post office parking lot—“A big Samoan hit me and now it feelslike there’s computers in my eye.”Everything big and distorted likethe 19-hour days and the 19-hour nights,mountains balding into summer nowas tourist traffic materializes onto streetswe first learned empty and white. AllI want: to explore the wilderness of Costcowith you in the Anchorage Dimond District,buy a new set of Tupperware with redlids and smooth sides. To be tamedwith you and tell you every nightwhich are stars, planes, and satellites.____Alyse Knorr is the author of the full-length collection Annotated Glass (Furniture Press Books, 2013) and the chapbook Alternates (dancing girl press, 2014). She earned her MFA in poetry from George Mason University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Caketrain, ZYZZYVA, Puerto Del Sol, and The Southern Poetry Anthology (Texas Review Press 2012), among others. She has received artist’s residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, New York Mills Arts Retreat, and the Millay Colony. She teaches at the University of Alaska Anchorage and co-edits Gazing Grain Press. 

AnchDown