Kyle McCord
Soviet Film
Beloit College, 2004
The professor turns off the projector,
and the students file out.
A Spruce Grouse’s
double clap sounds
from the river,
but this Wisconsin town
is disappeared now.
The campus’s conical mounds
replaced by Siberian slopes
glazed
in a cinereal palate.
Snow shines
the color of starvation,
intense enough to make a man
kill his friend.
You are there
in the library window
when they pass, some rubbing
palms,
some bartering cigarettes.
One hums, one runs
a nervous hand across a shoulder.
Where to go
but back to the bunks?
Stars with the sheen of frostbite
prick the sorority roof,
fingers
too famished to point.
Students pass ditches
glutted with cadaverous
silver, but you are busy
watching your visage
in library glass, backing up until,
like Vertov, you’re an image
recording an image, dredging
the lakes of your pupils.
What dead you find there
you cannot save.
Kyle McCord is the author of five books of poetry including You Are Indeed an Elk, But This is Not the Forest You Were Born to Graze (Gold Wake 2015) and Gentle, World, Gentler (Ampersand Books 2015). His third book was selected as one of five books of the year by the Poetry Foundation blog. He has work featured in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly and elsewhere. He’s received grants from the Academy of American Poets, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Baltic Writing Residency. He co-edits iO: A Journal of New American Poetry. He lives and teaches in Des Moines, Iowa, and is completing his PhD in creativing writing at the the University of North Texas.