Poetry

D. S. Waldman, a 2022–2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, directs the San Diego–based organization Poetic Youth, which brings MFA creative writing students into under-resourced high school classrooms to facilitate creative writing workshops. Raised in Central Kentucky, he lives in Southern California.

Phosphenes

by D. S. Waldman

Why is night your terrain? Your throat
of stars, each

                            a tiny scream of what
              you cannot


                            recall. Your throne


of starved light and the distance,
in darkness, it has


              no choice but


to travel. The line, when there is
                            a line, between dream


and memory: eyes looking up


from a slung-open
casket. A line,


                            •
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