Volume 16:1, Winter 2015
The Sonnet Issue
Subject to Change
Let us shove the last 73 minutes down the garbage
disposal and vacuum up all traces of the past 17 years
and stuff them in a plastic bag and be done with them.
Lets scrape our alternative versions of everything
we have learned since 1981 off the ground and flush
them all down the toilet. Im worn out by my misdeeds.
My hands hurt, my fingers wont curl anymore.
Im in the emergency room at Holy Cross hoping
all is not lost. I have no one to pray to, just the vast
empty sky, the black hole inside the black hole
that swallows up everything whole. They make
me lie down on the blank slate. Dr. Baker is running
late. Then the nurse lifts the curse and Baker says
youre a lucky man. It could have been worse.
Terence Winch’s latest book, That Ship Has Sailed, was published in 2023 as part of the Pitt Poetry Series from the University of Pittsburgh Press. He is the author of eight earlier poetry collections. A Columbia Book Award and American Book Award winner, he has also written a young adult novel called Seeing-Eye Boy and two story collections, Contenders and That Special Place. His work has appeared in many journals and in more than 50 anthologies, among them the Oxford Book of American Poetry, Poetry 180, and 6 editions of Best American Poetry. He is the recipient of an NEA Poetry Fellowship and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing, among other honors. The works featured here are from his forthcoming book of occasional love poems called It Is as If Desire, due in 2024 from Hanging Loose Press.