Volume 70, Number 2 · Spring 2021

Dispellations: Reverb

Anna Maria Hong


& they said,

                       let there be sound:

                                       a brush of breeze                           to brisk the

spirit trees

                                       a burr in the lattice       of the lyricist’s

utter 		   	       a snort

           of laughter ever 	             after  	             	       the scent of ice

                                                     lacing 		        under foot

                                                     let there be a tree of ruby fruit

                                                     let the asp be 	        the ambassador
of touch

                                                                 the ineluctable rush of

diamonds 	  on bark
                                   

                                                     let the tongue 	         part

acid-sugar-syntax-sharp

                                        
                                                                 let song 	 susurrate

                                                                 dark to dark

Anna Maria Hong is the author of Age of Glass, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition, the novella H & G, winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Book Prize, and Fablesque, winner of Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, The Common, Plume, Ecotone, the Hopkins Review, Smartish Pace, Poetry Daily, The Best American Poetry, and other publications. She is an assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College.