Christopher Nelson
Summer 2025 | Poetry
Hyacinth
so many
but ultimately too few
nights
how many chances
to break
the lock, to click
the latch and let
the inside out
and what comes
depraved or
thick with beauty
enigma slick
with dawn
running to or from
what we don’t know
ripe with
longing
burning of
we know not
we know
not what is rent
from self
as from a cliff
slaking, skating
the scree, goatlike
or placid
on the blanket you laid
where the redbud
has come undone
and the toddler eats
hyacinth
on the sly
as my finger finds
the edge
of your skirt and
sanctity has long been
forgotten
so too redemption
even desire
except in those
irrational flares we
do well to honor
having come this far
Christopher Nelson is the author of Blood Aria (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021) and five chapbooks, including Blue House, winner of a Poetry Society of America Fellowship. A recipient of the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship and a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, he is the founding editor of Green Linden Press, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to poetic excellence and reforestation. He has edited two anthologies, Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora, which received a Midwest Book Award, and Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry. Visit christophernelson.info.