Academy of American Poets
View Cart | Log In 
Subscribe | More Info 
Find a Poet or Poem
Advanced Search >
Want more poems?
Subscribe to our
Poem-A-Day emails.
FURTHER READING
Poems by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
RR Lyrae: Matter
Transit of Venus
Related Poems
Red Wand
by Sandra Simonds
Poems about Loss
Affirmation
by Donald Hall
Ashes
by Paula Meehan
Burning the Old Year
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Catastrophe Theory III
by Mary Jo Bang
from Projection
by Lidija Dimkovska
Haunted
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Heavy Summer Rain
by Jane Kenyon
I Found Her Out There
by Thomas Hardy
I'll Try to Tell You What I Know
by Martha Serpas
Loss
by Carl Adamshick
please advise stop [I was dragging a ladder slowly over stones stop]
by Rusty Morrison
Room in Antwerp
by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Some People
by Wislawa Szymborska
Song ["When I am dead, my dearest"]
by Christina Rossetti
the lost baby poem
by Lucille Clifton
Sponsor a Poet Page | Add to Notebook | Email to Friend | Print

Challenger

 
by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

pretty's just armor
something else

to wear like a dress or a name
not magic like skin

apparel apparent apparently
repellant pretty
don't draw

flies like
honey we just pretend

it does skin is

what draws you don't
believe me

just think skin flick 

the winter sky 
is not a skin you 
might fly right 

out

past it but pretty	
makes an atmosphere
it's hard to get back in

one hitch one weak 

O ring and you are that 
white                    dense 
puff of pinkish smoke 

too thick for cloud
trailers swerving off in opposite
directions someone not
coming home you believed
lifting off you were

bound somewhere boundless 
you will never be that

pretty again









Copyright © 2011 by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon. Used with permission of the author.
Larger TypeLarger Type | Home | Help | Contact Us | Privacy Policy Copyright © 1997 - 2013 by Academy of American Poets.