Joshua Weiner

In the Midlands

A different person
emerges with new allergies people
change in front of you:
Stacey Stranger she carried some
around we’ll never know her hand’s
rash lit the way
winter nights surviving her name

at home
crisp bedsheets
edged like blades
a menacing clover scent playing
radio games
seeping through open screens

  at school
she’d put down her head
arms on the desk and leave
her faces there her illness wondering

were we really enemies?
rough and graceless, foreign and proud
we sought each other outside
locked cabinets closets weird rocks
in salamander creek transformed secrets
the key to the powerplant found in a pocket
and between them darkness
infiltrates the lace

laid on us days
inside escaping something
in the heat her artistry
is what’s missing
to peer from from the midlands

found in the music the mirror
snow mountain in the distance

behind picture frames
that forces the wall
deathless currents
or strands of Lutz Seiler braiding through
(like everything squirrels do
a specific tightrope)
she sleeps a whisper
down avenues
running out of ink

imposters sneak back in
and light the lamps

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Joshua Weiner is the author of three books of poetry and a book of political and cultural reportage, Berlin Notebook: Where Are the Refugees? (Los Angeles Review of Books, 2016). He is the translator of Nelly Sachs’s Flight & Metamorphosis (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022). He lives in Washington, DC, and teaches at University of Maryland.