Have sympathy for the sand.
There are no coincidences
in the phone’s light
on the deluge of choice.
Here I am, on one side
of its white ravine.
I have no sympathy for banks!
The cinematic is where I run
to or from pursuit
of a view that will make me feel
time exists outside of myself
as the heat of the day
rises in the grass
on its way to other people.
—
Jasmine Dreame Wagner is an American poet, musician, and multimedia artist. She is the author of On a Clear Day (Ahsahta Press, 2017), a collection of lyric essays and poems called “a capacious book of traveller’s observations, cultural criticism, and quarter-life-crisis notes” by Stephanie Burt at The New Yorker and “a radical cultural anthropology of the wild time we’re living in” by Iris Cushing at Hyperallergic. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Beloit Poetry Journal, BOMB, Colorado Review, Fence, Guernica, Hyperallergic, Indiana Review, New American Writing, Verse, and in three anthologies: The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press, 2012), Lost and Found: Stories From New York (Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood Books, 2009), and We Like It Fast: Writing Prompts and Model Stories from the Editors and Contributors of NANO Fiction. An EP, Switchblade Moon, will be out in 2020.