Lauren Clark

Listening to Rolling in the Deep for Twenty Hours Straight

Everyone else has plugged their ears with wax, I thought. 
I am the only person listening across this entire nation,

I thought. I am the smart one. Out the train window,



all the people I love were standing in a mass in the middle of the spring cornfield.

                         Cornfield because it was cutting through one
                                         late at night, feeling their leaves catch
                                         on my hair and eyelashes, their ears
                                         organlike against my body, blocking
                                         out the sky, the cornfield taught me
                                         how many things can be mistaken
                                         for the touch of another human body.


And the people I love didn’t look at one another
because, let’s face it, the people I love don’t love
one another.

And they all took one step in different directions
in unison.

Lauren Clark's first collection of poems, Music for a Wedding, was selected by Vijay Seshadri for the 2016 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry.  It will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2017.  They work at Poets House in New York City and collaborate with Etc. Gallery in Chicago.  They exist online at www.laurclar.com.