Anne Winters is the author of The Displaced of Capital (University of Chicago Press, 2004 ), which was awarded the William Carlos Williams Prize and the 2005 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She recently received a Guggenheim fellowship for the 2006/2007 academic year. Winters is also the author of The Key to the City (1986), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her translations of contemporary French poet Robert Marteau were awarded Poetry Magazine’s Jacob Glatstein Memorial Prize. She has published poems and essays in The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, and The Yale Review. She teaches at the University of Illinois—Chicago.
East Eleventh Street: Three Images
in the nineties, sheathed with brown-painted iron and dented
by the brooms of nocturnal rage...You must have lain
almost hugging it, the way our break-in rolled you
onto your back, left arm flung out. Two: unforgettable
inner-arm map of rucked veins, black punctures
and your fingers still slightly curled on the floor beneath
the dangling receiver. You managed to reach me, Ellen,
but no one could have reached you. No one wanted to reach you.
Only the friend too remote to hang up; then, three,
and all I'll keep of the whole thing, I swear it—the pre-dawn
bus ride across the city to your place, the strange
fawn light falling everywhere, on empty corners and diners,
the first coins dropping in the driver’s metal bowl.