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Written by Anders Carlson-Wee. Posted in Poetry.
Whoever you are, they take care of you.
Dean leans over and labors the crank-window,
asking where you need to go. Lillian shows
how to clean and reload. Tucker. The Lees.
Savannah shrunk by cancer. Lyle by diet,
ordering you what he can’t eat. Hands that pass
the double cheese and hands that steer the wheel,
a foot floored toward Tennessee, our necks keeping
Hendrix’s beat. Each morning another warning
about the darkness out there. Triple murder,
no suspects. Alien abductions in the Palouse.
A family gone missing. A family found,
their organs removed. Each day, against all this
breaking news, another stranger saving you.
Reprinted from The Low Passions by Anders Carlson-Wee. Copyright (c) 2019 by Anders Carlson-Wee. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Anders Carlson-Wee
Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of THE LOW PASSIONS (W.W. Norton, 2019), a New York Public Library Book Group Selection, and DYNAMITE (Bull City Press, 2015), winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, BuzzFeed, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sun, New England Review, The Southern Review, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and many other publications. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, he is the winner of the 2017 Poetry International Prize. His work has been translated into Chinese. Anders holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University and is represented by Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents.
