“Apophasis at the All-Night Rite Aid” [by Catherine Barnett]
Not wanting to be alone
in the messy cosmology
over which I at this late hour
have too much dominion,
I wander the all-night uptown Rite Aid
where the handsome new pharmacist,
come midnight, shows me to the door
and prescribes the moon,
which has often helped before.
Catherine Barnett is the author of three poetry collections, Human Hours (2018 Believer Book Award in Poetry), The Game of Boxes (James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets) and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced. Her fourth collection, Solutions to the Problem of Bodies in Space, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in May 2024. A Guggenheim fellow, she received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s, among many other places. She teaches in the NYU MFA Program in Creative Writing and works as an independent editor.
from The Kenyon Review; photo credit: Farah Al Qasimi and Res
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Author: The Best American Poetry
