The Tattooed Poets Project: Alexandra Teague

Today's poem comes to us from Alexandra Teague, from her prize-winning first collection, Mortal Geography:

~~~

Hurricane Season

When I become accustomed at last to lying in bed alone,

sheets finely wrinkled as curtains blown across the windows

of dreams, and the crane-necked streetlight fills the room

with its electric-nerved, luminous vision, what I had

seen for my future (the restless flowering of his arms in sleep

around my shoulder, the soiled pillows in their matching cases

where our faces, breaths apart, turned toward and away) recedes

like the hurricane that never hit land the night we met,

when the beach was evacuated, the buildings shuttered in plywood,

and the news crews stood dry amid the whipping palms,

in the margins of their own story. Later, we saw a photograph shot

high in the clouds: the storm’s eye turning above the ocean,

as we swam at midnight in the pool naked, waiting to be swept up

in a chlorine shudder, a geyser of winds, into the rapture

of our lives. And though we almost bought it together, we didn’t.

Somewhere, framed in its calm bay of glass, that storm is hanging—

on the gallery’s wall at the pinpoint end of this land, or in a room

like the one where even now he is lying beside her, sleep’s

aperture narrowing around them, and all the years when we almost

loved each other forever, at last, blown far off the shore of this life.

~~~

Be sure to head over to Tattoosday to see two of Alexandra's tattoos here.

Alexandra Teague’s first book of poetry, Mortal Geography, won the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and has just been published (April 2010) by Persea Books. Her work has also appeared in Best New Poets 2008, Best American Poetry 2009, and The Yale Anthology of Younger American Poetry, as well as journals including The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, and New England Review. She was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and has since lived in Arkansas, Missouri, Florida, Montana, Hawaii, and California. She currently teaches English at City College of San Francisco and lives in Oakland. For more information about upcoming readings and publications, visit www.alexandrateague.com.

Thanks to Alexandra for sharing her poetry with us here on the Tattooed Poets Project!