Frannie Lindsay

Objects in Mirror Are Larger than They Appear
February 10, 2014 Lindsay Frannie

Objects in Mirror Are Larger than They Appear

 

That beautiful girl on a bicycle smoking a cigarette:

her library books are due back

 

and her boyfriend is starting to ask himself if

he ever loved her, although he knows she has tried so hard

 

to stop making those feathery cuts on her forearms. See how

the ashes of everything

 

slide into their easy disguise as sunlight. See how

her backpack zipper winks like it can’t keep a secret.

 

Death and envy are back on the loose! They are ducking behind

each bulkhead and pile of leaves in their falling-off clothes,

 

reaching limblessly out to the tips of all they are not

allowed to touch.

Frannie Lindsay’s sixth volume of poetry, The Snow’s Wife was published by Cavankerry Press as part of their Notable Voices Series. Her other titles are If Mercy and Mayweed (The Word Works); Our Vanishing (Red Hen Press); Lamb (Perugia); and Where She Always Was (Utah State University Press). She has held residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Millay Colony. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and many others, as well as The Best American Poetry and The Plume Anthology of Poetry. She is a past winner of the Missouri Review Prize.