Max Winter's poems have appeared recently in Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, The Paris Review, and New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois, 2000). His reviews have appeared in recent issues of The Boston Review, Rain Taxi and Bomb.

Now I write at the cuff of the world. I catch myself drifting, and would think to be a man. Would the poem of woman differ from the poem of man? That the poem of woman would be standing and the poem of man sitting, legs and arms crossed. Must be one different from the other. One of them must be humming with ripeness, the other just. Not. Cannot be both. The women who watch me start to open their programs. They would speak at a high pitch if they would opt to speak. But they would not opt in this darkness. There is room only for my rhetoric. Because I am the woman speaking and I am the woman writing the poems. Not to be too fine. There is a man, after all. Out watching me like a mantis. The only thing putting him from me is I loved him once. Some would say they go away. Staring at the seat before him. Wonders where I am, why I do not sit in that traveled seat. That is not my question. I did not begin that in him. But he asks now, look at the mess. Piled so high. It hides her eye. Have you seen that look before? I feel nothing as I listen but a tapping on my ear. As if a stray dog nuzzled at it. Freshly escaped. Freshly filthy. It began as a tiny thread, he says, and grew into a whole catastrophic skein. (Do not listen. He is only one of many.) We were laughing when we lay the great gray cubes, he says. The great gray cubes are hard as flesh. I know them, he says. (I reckon you. I thank you. No one goes home without a bruise. What would the world be, anyway.) Or maybe that's not it. Hope, Spring I have not slept and yet I am happy. I have spent the whole night listening to straight lines clattering on my desk, covering each other up. They cannot help falling, it is as if they have been pushed from behind the gauze curtains and although they vanish almost instantly, there's a story in the descent like flower petals soaked in water to make a sort of invisible ink readable only by footbound princesses. What I have been trying to do is be one of those princesses, although my voice is too deep and my footsteps too heavy on the snow. It keeps you awake or at least in hopes, a matter that turns itself over and over again without ever connecting parts to your liking. Thus entangled you walk out to the country in hopes that an answer will pick you up and the radio will be well awake and you will rattle singing into the yellow-pink continuance. But if it doesn't happen, you fall in love, as I have, with the first thing you see, which is in this case a dead chimera. Its head rises like a foreshadow in the perpetual musky dawn even as I have taken a rod and lifted this simple cranium up to greet us, even as I push the thing back to the water. I'm wise enough by this hour to know this is a beginning, if not of a city then of a dream. They Said I'd like to tell you But I can't I forgot what I was saying After the last cloud dissolved It wasn't necessary It was more about pulling loose You can do that at any time You don't even have to be awake You are attentive I will begin again But the serpents say stop I listen because I know something I cannot say what it is You note my silence I am in bounds from now until then I might try writing down these thoughts I worry they won't stay Everyone worries Everyone stays close to where they wish to be If the time comes to go there All they have to do is say it It is all easy If you have the right attachments What are yours I have asked before I forgot I have not listened And we have sat on this rock for twenty years Waiting for a meaningful contribution from the air What do we offer What is our sacrifice When did breath become a standard