It is the bread that will not be baked.
The bread that rises and continues to rise.
It is the recital performed every night—
Little girl
in a snowstorm

in an empty auditorium.  Not the soldier
on a horse, bearing
a skull on a pole.  No, it is the way

I call your name, many
years too late, just

your dark omnipresence now as it stretches
from one edge of the everything to the next.

Laura Kasischke has published eight collections of poetry and eight novels.  Her most recent collection, SPACE, IN CHAINS (Copper Canyon 2011) received the National Book Critics Circle Award.  She lives in Chelsea, Michigan, with her husband and son and teaches at the University of Michigan.