Canary

poetry

1
Some folks got tortured
by folks

right afterwards
at an obscure

farmer’s market
where handcrafted soda

and artisanal mining

showed
we were on the right track.

Canaries
served as coq-au-vin.

We thought of events
as landmarks

first,
then as life-buoys,

but in this too
we were mistaken.

Rae Armantrout has published fifteen books, including Conjure, Wobble (a finalist for the National Book Award), Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2015, and Versed (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award). She is the current judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. A new collection, Finalists, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in March 2022. Armantrout is a professor emerita at the University of California, San Diego.