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Carlie Hoffman is the author of This Alaska, forthcoming from Four Way Books, 2021. She is the recipient of an Amy Award from Poets & Writers and fellowships from Brooklyn Poets, the New York State Summer Writers Institute and Columbia University, where she received her MFA. Her poems have been published in Bennington Review, Boston Review, North American Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly and elsewhere, and she has been listed as one of Narrative Magazine’s “30 Below 30” poets. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Purchase College, SUNY and also teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She is the founding editor and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal. Find her online at https://www.carliehoffman.com/
The poem and manuscript below were included in the printed program of the 2016 Discovery Winners’ Reading. “Sudden Hymn in Winter” was first published by Nashville Review.
Some women are all the women
you’ve ever loved at once. Somewhere else
a man chases her image with a can
of orange spray paint. Evening has already
happened. He shades the almost-
touching, half-formed hands of Matisse’s dancers
onto the side of the train, and her light
is different now, though he knows this is not possible,
not really. Light does not change, just gets lost
inside the greater thing. And if he could go back
it wouldn’t be to the hospital
where the sun forked through the space
his body left as he turned out of the room,
or the first kiss, but farther still, to the moment
just before, looking out at the pond in muzzled
autumn, the fish curving on the cusp
of emergency, all those rivers mapped inside them.
And they’d watch quietly until sundown, because he doesn’t
do this work for forgiveness, but because the fact
of grace disgusts him.
He knows this much:
It was winter. Her hair was thinning. After,
for a while, it is winter all the time.
