Late Night Unspooling

Sarah Blackman

Because what comes from the body
is a claim for the body. The bodymakes a claim on the air that surrounds
it by one millimeter like flowersmake a claim on their air with their outrageous
color, like bees do with vibration, oryoung men with anger. At night, when I
need to be calmed, I inhabit again the daysof my children’s births. The oldest one tipped
blue and staring, the youngest roundand tightly shut. Mine says the body
Mine mine mine. And it means around itthe soil and the air, the greening light
that comes from the exhalation of growthwhich is a plant’s only joy. On summer evenings
the child’s hair lifts up toward the roof as if the shapeof the roof could draw to it all unshapes
and make them triangular. Power is a stable base,is the eye opening for the first time—
the density of nothing and then sudden, shocking light.

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Sarah Blackman is the Director of Creative Writing at the Fine Arts Center, an arts magnet high school in Greenville, South Carolina. She is the co-fiction editor of DIAGRAM and the founding editor of Crashtest, an online magazine for high school age writers and artists. Her short story collection, Mother Box, won the Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction and was published by FC2 in 2013. Her novel, Hex, came out with the same press in 2016.

Crazyhorse

Fall 2017

Charleston, South Carolina

College of Charleston

Poetry Editor
Emily Rosko

Associate Poetry Editor
Gary Jackson

Contributing Editor & Poetry Translations
Scott Minar

Managing Editor
Jonathan Bohr Heinen

Founded by the poet Tom McGrath in Los Angeles in 1960, Crazyhorse continues to be one of the finest, most influential literary journals published today. Past contributors include such renowned authors as John Updike, Raymond Carver, Jorie Graham, John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Ha Jin, W. P. Kinsella, Richard Wilbur, James Wright, Carolyn Forché, Charles Simic, Charles Wright, Billy Collins, Galway Kinnell, James Tate and Franz Wright. Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners alike appear regularly in its pages, right alongside Guggenheim fellows, National Endowment for the Arts fellowship recipients, and writers whose work appears in the O. Henry Prize, Pushcart Prize, and Best American anthologies.

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