Gary Duehr
Summer 2025 | Poetry
Afterwards
A shampoo bottle, a high heel,
a scrap of curtain
Putting on your wife’s glasses,
wearing your brother’s clothes
Sleeping in an apartment
not your own
All the empty places
where life is suspended
Try asking your daughter
who appears with her double
at your bedside: their faces bob up
through your eyelashes, their names
just out out of reach
Everything goes along fine
until one day it doesn’t
A nurse calls but leaves no message
There is a little problem at work
You reach for a half gallon of milk
where there is none
Based in Boston, Gary Duehr has an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. In 2001 he received an NEA Fellowship, and he has also received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the LEF Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Journals in which his writing has appeared include Agni, American Literary Review, Chiron Review, Cottonwood, Hawaii Review, Hotel Amerika, Iowa Review, and North American Review.
His books include Point Blank (In Case of Emergency Press), Winter Light (Four Way Books) and Where Everyone Is Going To (St. Andrews College Press).