Joseph Campana is the author of The Book of Faces (Graywolf, 2005). His poems appear or will appear in Slate, Boston Review, Conjunctions, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, TriQuarterly and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a 2007 Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA and teaches Renaissance literature at Rice University.
In media rest: don’t pick up
the phone and walk around.
Your new best friend has a
twist or two. You’d think
exposure would be worth
something. Hey, nonny nonny:
the clock is bare and the flowers
pelt down like ruptured acorns.
Anything of the earth too long
will burst open, in rain and with
worms will burst: don’t tell me
you don’t feel: sorry: something in
you twists me. Sit down now the walls
are closing: do let’s start the middle.
You’ve left the store, your
umbrella twirls snow: radial
structures sliding sky inward.
Your watery emanations I abhor:
I can tell you at last I’ve been
listening all this time. What
you say you say boldly: as if
sound alone could guarantee
hearing. Darling! Even my own
assertions are as field mice
buried in snow and you some
straggling city: no corn no green
in sight. What else is there for
ice to do but snap your cabled
hands out of the invisible lie?
© 2009
Salt Publishing Limited 
