Emily Oliver
The Fence
By the lake, when the kitchen doesn’t need you
until noon, we try to think of jobs
that would be of any use.
Past us, a fawn sprints
her child face into the fence
of the dog run. She leaps away &
butts back into it harder. Her stick legs
triangle & shudder. The fence
shudders back, its steel latches
swallow an apology. I hear my voice,
rehearsing how to tell it later, we ran
the deer off. We don’t & watch
her collision repeat, propelled
away by panic. Back again,
in what we recognize is protest.
Rain, Top Floor, Jackson Heights
I am the eyes of this building now.
I came just so the cat could eat
and not believe that human life
had ceased in Queens. Spike,
(a Siamese), is it enough
to prove my animal that I
ate a roll of scalloped crackers
from another’s snack drawer? Rosemary
is a beauty of the ground. I am the eye,
staring east into this gasp of rain.
I have lain on the antique carpet behind
the four-cornered corneas.
It is true. I was given some pleasures,
withheld others. Laughing,
a boy once called my contact lenses spare
parts for the eye. Elsewhere, I’d be blind
but here: the sight of bird song, thunder
height, this isn’t my apartment
but here I am, its mind.
Emily Oliver is a poet who lives in Minneapolis. She received an MFA from Cornell University. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, OmniVerse, DIAGRAM and elsewhere. She has been awarded a Sicca Grant, the Corson-Browning Poetry Prize and a Queens Council on the Arts New Work Grant. She works at Carleton College where she is Associate Director of the Center for Community and Civic Engagement and a lecturer in the Program for Ethical Inquiry. Emily is the Co-PI of the Carleton Faribault PAR Collaboration, a participatory action research project about educational equity in Faribault, MN.