[jumpsuits]

By Ben Lerner b. 1979 Ben Lerner

jumpsuits, they have changed

painting, I

behind the concertina wire

can't look at it anymore, that wall

across which shadows play

Sorry to be vague

at such an hour. Were you

When I called, I heard

my voice

anywhere near waking

in the background

Strange, reversible lines, I thought

he was dead. He is

better of it, pushing the glass

away. How many songs

can it hold, that thing

I've seen in windows, has it changed

singing, or

hooded figures

I didn't know

it had a camera, some features are

The blue of links, obscure

beneath the face, the green

We still don't have a word for

Simulated drowning in

embedded streams

a perfect world

Source: Mean Free Path (Copper Canyon Press, 2010)

Biography

Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, poet and editor Ben Lerner earned a BA in political science and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, and was a Fulbright scholar in Madrid.

Lerner is the author of several full-length poetry collections, including Mean Free Path (2010) and Angle of Yaw (2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. His sonnet sequence, The . . .

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