on new year’s eve

By Evie Shockley Evie Shockley

we make midnight a maquette of the year:

frostlight glinting off snow to solemnize

the vows we offer to ourselves in near

silence: the competition shimmerwise

of champagne and chandeliers to attract

laughter and cheers: the glow from the fireplace

reflecting the burning intra-red pact

between beloveds: we cosset the space

of a fey hour, anxious gods molding our

hoped-for adams with this temporal clay:

each of us edacious for shining or

rash enough to think sacrifice will stay

this fugacious time: while stillness suspends

vitality in balance, as passions

struggle with passions for sway, the mind wends

towards what’s to come: a callithump of fashions,

ersatz smiles, crowded days: a bloodless cut

that severs soul from bone: a long aching

quiet in which we will hear nothing but

the clean crack of our promises breaking.

Source: the new black (Wesleyan University Press, )

Biography

Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, poet Evie Shockley earned a BA at Northwestern University, a JD at the University of Michigan, and a PhD in English literature at Duke University. The author of several collections of poetry, including a half-red sea (2006) and the new black (2011), Shockley is also the author of the critical volume Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry . . .

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