Unlearning Object Permanence

Appearance, disappearance
make the hidden logic
visible.
 
Start with a coin, an orange.
A woman goes
behind a tree. A man
goes behind the ground.
 
An explosion of starlings
upends the solid,
classical architecture.
 
Ruin is the new sublime:
trillium at the salt flats.
 
 
 

Benjamin Landry is the author of Particle and Wave and An Ocean Away, and he is a fall 2015 Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. He held the Mina Shaughnessy Scholarship in Writing at the Bread Loaf School of English and the Meijer Post-MFA Fellowship at the University of Michigan. He and his wife—the fiction writer Sara Schaff—have taught creative writing and English in the United States, Colombia and China for a decade. His poetry has appeared in Guernica, The New Yorker, Poetry Daily and elsewhere. Learn more about his work at http://benjaminlandry.wordpress.com.