Nikolai von Keller

Yurimaguas to Tarapoto, Peru

This is exactly how I remember it -
rocks like old blood,
      the sound of water,
           periodic dust storms
      amused by our closed windows,
the poor and their small, mean faces.

           There are eighty miles
between Yurimaguas and Tarapoto,
      but somehow eight hours,
           seven lives:

           One mother feeds her body
      to an infant, inch by inch.
The second’s mouth spills over with light.
           Our driver drapes his stomach
      over the wheel like fabric being sold.
A drunk sleeps within
           the brittle folds of his disease,
      A painter thinks of symmetry.

           The last, the unobserved,
      considers hunting for a mirror,
           but then dust fills the back of the car
and we take it unwillingly into ourselves.

Author Bio

Nikolai von Keller is a graduate of Bowdoin College. His work has appeared in Albion College’s Albion Review and USC’s Lettered Olive, and he has been awarded the Forbes Rickard Poetry Prize and the Nathalie Walker Llewellyn Poetry Prize.