Malachi Black is the author of the poetry collection Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). As the current Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University, his poems appear or are forthcoming in journals including Poetry, Ploughshares, Boston Review, AGNI, Narrative, The Southern Review, and SouthwestReview, among others, as well as in several recent and forthcoming anthologies, including Discoveries: New Writing from The Iowa Review; Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (Yale UP); and The Poet’s Quest for God (UK). The recipient of a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship (awarded by the Poetry Foundation in conjunction with Poetry magazine), Black has since been granted fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers, the University of Utah, and Yaddo. Black was featured as the subject of an Emerging Poet profile by Mark Jarman in the Academy of American Poets’ American Poet magazine, and his work has several times been set to music and otherwise featured in exhibitions both in the U.S. and abroad. He will be Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of San Diego beginning Fall 2014.
Traveling
by Train
And faster past another frozen river,
the brambles, shrubs, and underbrush of dead
woods and the garbage that was left behind
by runaways and skunks: the plastic bags
and twine, shoes beside forgotten brands
of beer whose cans, so battered by the weather,
have all but disappeared—like the whiteness
of a smoke after it’s cleared. And you’ve been on
this train too long to know the time; you’re lost
between the meter and the desperate rhyme
of clacking tracks. Home is nothing here.
You’re gone and in the going; can’t come back.
This poem first appeared in Agni.
And faster past another frozen river,
the brambles, shrubs, and underbrush of dead
woods and the garbage that was left behind
by runaways and skunks: the plastic bags
and twine, shoes beside forgotten brands
of beer whose cans, so battered by the weather,
have all but disappeared—like the whiteness
of a smoke after it’s cleared. And you’ve been on
this train too long to know the time; you’re lost
between the meter and the desperate rhyme
of clacking tracks. Home is nothing here.
You’re gone and in the going; can’t come back.
This poem first appeared in Agni.
© 2014
Malachi Black
Malachi Black was a Featured Poet who read his poetry at the November 2014 Second Sunday Poetry Series
Malachi Black was a Featured Poet who read his poetry at the November 2014 Second Sunday Poetry Series