by Carlie Hoffman

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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When my sisters can’t scrub the oil
from the sick gull’s feathers, they clip

its wings, untie the cord that binds
the slow sheet of its body

and plant it into a wooden box
drilled with tiny holes. It is my turn

to bring the diseased bird
to the breeder across the bank:

his medicine knives, his hut occupied
with feeders and soap. But because I am

youngest, because a hunter’s moon
is how I locate heaven, I take the gull

down the wharf, kneel in an untouched
tract of snow, and quiet its skull with rock.

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Carlie Hoffman is the author of When There Was Light (Four Way Books, 2023) and This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021), winner of the NCPA Gold Award in poetry and a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. She is the translator of White Shadows: Anneliese Hager and the Camera-less Photograph (Atelier Éditions, 2023) and Selma Meerbaum Eisinger's Blütenlese (Hanging Loose Press, 2024). Her honors include a 92Y "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Prize, a Poet’s & Writers Amy Award, and the Loose Translation Prize, and her work has been published in POETRY, Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Jewish Currents, Columbia Journal, New England Review, and elsewhere.

by Carlie Hoffman

When the dawn gulls call
we meet them near the wharf’s edge.

There is wind. The ferryman
gone, quarters scattered

along the dock. The sun a rusted
knob unhounding light.

Our landscape: blond hills stretch
into more blond hills. Our tongues

stunned in observance of white-tails in the field.
Everywhere, unflinching, the public

glare of August. Never have we been
so involved with our bodies, the risk

of them. A sorrow soft
and punctual as antlers in bloom.

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Carlie Hoffman is the author of This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021), which is a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. Her second collection is forthcoming with Four Way Books in 2023. A poet and translator, her honors include a 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize and a Poet’s & Writers Amy Award. Her work has been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, New England Review, Jewish Currents, and other publications. Carlie earned her MFA from Columbia University and is a Lecturer of Creative Writing at Purchase College-SUNY. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal and lives in Brooklyn.

by Carlie Hoffman

Just now a woman in a yellow
dress and matching hair bands enters the train
holding a plastic microphone,
and, because at midnight she turned fifty-two,
will sing Happy Birthday through the eleven
screeching stops home. Happy birthday to me
she is stomping her suede purple heel
as she sways from one end of the car
to the other. Happy, happy
birthday, even in the elevator as I
make my way toward the subway exit, her metal cane
tapping against cement like a drumstick.
I don’t know if she is drunk on gin or some other
almost upper that slowly ends in disgust,
though that is not my story to tell.
Somehow it is autumn. Somehow, yesterday,
I managed to wash my sheets. Like you,
I do not know if happiness
is anything more extravagant than a goal
to shape our lives toward, and it’s
too early for the rest of our lives.

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Carlie Hoffman is the author of This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021). Her second book is forthcoming with Four Way Books in 2023. A poet and translator, her honors include a 92Y Boston Review / Discovery Prize and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, and her work has been published in Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Boston Review, Jewish Currents, New England Review, and elsewhere. Carlie is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal. For more, visit www.carliehoffman.com.