Julianne Buchsbaum is the author of Slowly, Slowly, Horses (2001, Ausable Press). She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a recipient of the Paul Engle Fellowship. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various journals, including Conduit, FENCE, Verse, The Journal, Southwest Review, and Harvard Review and are soon to be anthologized in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Ms. Buchsbaum is currently working toward her Ph.D. in English and Creative-Writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she is a G. Ellsworth Huggins fellow. A Little Night Comes will be available from Del Sol Press in Fall, 2005.

From A Little Night Comes:

BEYOND FLUORESCENCE

Soon this place will go strange on us in the white afterglow
of electrical storms, the skin of winter,

in the Dammerung of a power outage, I dream
of downed wires and the picked locks of neighbors'

homes and all the houses on the street where I live,
the bars on windows, the sense of threat and death,

because when slag glows on the outskirts of town,
it burns all the hands that come near it, all the eyes,

wildflowers, all things that fire hurts are hurt by it,
even insects lose their wings and float down flooded

ditches. Soon there will be no one but strangers to take
our place because somewhere at the end of this place

is another place where animals materialize by the highway,
where no one will know why you went when you left

that morning with no license or address, your face already
roughened by the moon, umber leaves, with a madness

for anonymity, at the edge of a hint of a garden, no laws
to follow, gleaming, towards the Northern horse latitudes,

past the cattlebrown of cornfields, beyond fluorescence
and leather, beginning to renounce what you had stolen,

leaving alluvial deposits of land to fence and feathergrass,
forgetting fires that burned, glass that broke in your hand.

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