Hush

/ Issue 10.2 /

We say that it falls,
(as sifts its warm,
muted cousin,
the dusk, into copses
and corners),
and often it does
in a breath
descend to a conflux
of faces anticipating
each some tensile
and spotlit
suspense,
but every once
in a cool,
cerulean moon
its dumbness will
switch from
downward to lift,
as when after the end
of a parched,
simple crying,
a hush then
rises and rises
and rises.

Hailey Leithauser

Hailey Leithauser

Hailey Leithauser's books are Swoop(2013), winner of the Poetry Foundation's Emily Dickinson First Book Award and the Towson Prize for Literature, and Saint Worm (2019). She is currently at work on a new manuscript, poems from which have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Agni, the Alaska Quarterly Review, The Birmingham Poetry Review, the Cincinnati Review/, the Gettysburg Review, and other journals.
Hailey Leithauser

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Author: Hailey Leithauser

Hailey Leithauser's books are Swoop (2013), winner of the Poetry Foundation's Emily Dickinson First Book Award and the Towson Prize for Literature, and Saint Worm (2019). She is currently at work on a new manuscript, poems from which have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Agni, the Alaska Quarterly Review, The Birmingham Poetry Review, the Cincinnati Review/, the Gettysburg Review, and other journals.