Deleted Poem

Julie Hanson
Published on January 2, 2020

It was good, but
seemed not good enough.
It was heartless
but throbbed nonetheless.

I will not willingly admit
how long I spent on it.
And yet it was easy,
once gone, to forget:

space lingered
but a moment, then closed up.

Time passed, decades did.
But it was boxed. It was hid.
Had backed off
like a monk with a hood.

It returned, of course,
disciplined, reformed,
as if it had, itself,
something to remit.

"Deleted Poem" is from the forthcoming book The Audible and the Evident by Julie Hanson, © 2020. Reprinted by permission of Ohio University Press. www.ohioswallow.com

Genre: 
Poetry
Author Bio: 

Julie Hanson is the author of Unbeknownst (University of Iowa Press, 2011), Iowa Poetry Prize winner and finalist for 2012 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and The Audible and the Evident, which won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize this year and will be published by Ohio University Press in 2020. Her poetry has earned fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Cincinnati Review, and New Ohio Review, and recent publication in Smartish Pace, Under a Warm Green Linden, New Ohio Review, and Plume.

Issue: 
62