In Quarantine - Last night I dreamed
Last night I dreamed of you with an ivory
stripe—by the time I knew you, all your hair
was white. As if you’d bathed your life
in an upstream ripple. Nobody could laugh
like you—your forehead, and eyes, and your
rapturous deep vowels. Or no other genius
could laugh the way you did. I never understood
why you had to disappear: in another era,
you’d have rented empty rooms against the sea.
Christina Pugh’s new book of essays on poetry, Ghosts and the Overplus, was just released by the University of Michigan Press “Poets on Poetry” series. She has also published five books of poems including Stardust Media (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. Her sixth book of poetry, The Right Hand, is forthcoming (Tupelo Press, 2024). Her poems have appeared widely, including in The Atlantic, Poetry, Yale Review, Colorado Review, and other publications. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, and others, she is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was recently announced Distinguished Scholar of the Year in Humanities, Arts, Design, and Architecture. www.christinapughpoet.com