—no matter how much
muscle I might have
mustered—my mother
was like to come along
behind, reach around
me to take it up again
from where I’d left it,
lift it back into my line
of vision and in one
practiced motion from
that strangle in her bare
hands and thin air work
a second miraculous
stream of silver dishwash
into the day’s last gleam . . .
Source: Poetry (December 2008).
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This poem originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Poetry magazine
Poet Todd Boss grew up on a cattle farm in Wisconsin, and was educated at St. Olaf College and the University of Alaska Anchorage, where he received an MFA. Boss’s pared-down, idea-driven poems are propelled by internal rhyme and balance clarity with a nuanced attention to sound. “I think of poems as pieces of music, or a work of architecture,” he told the Utne Reader in 2009. “The poem is a space that you’re inviting someone . . .
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