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.