Zipping your skirt, you rustle past,
sand hissing through a glass,
with the Bedouin snap and flash
of static-electric
sparks disturbing fabric.
This morning’s charge could rouse
The Desert Fathers of Sinai
over which I drowse.
Source: Poetry (April 2010).
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This poem originally appeared in the April 2010 issue of Poetry magazine
Born in Canton, New York, Devin Johnston grew up in Winston-Salem and received his PhD from the University of Chicago.
Johnston is the author of several collections of poetry, including Sources (2008), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Aversions (2004) and Telepathy (2001). His prose writing includes the critical study Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice (2002) and Creaturely and . . .
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