Poetry of Lee Briccetti > Woodland Pattern Book Center

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Lee Briccetti

Lee Briccetti is the long-time Executive Director of Poets House, a 50,000-volume poetry library and meeting place in New York City. Under her leadership, Poets House developed the Poets House Showcase, an annual exhibit of new poetry books, as well as the Poetry in The Branches, a national outreach program that assists public libraries throughout the country in providing poetry services. Lee is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts Award for Poetry and has been a Poetry Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her first book of poetry, Day Mark, was published in 2005 by Four Way Books.

Day Mark

Lee Briccetti

During the evacuation I walked up
the thirty-six floors in a darkness
so utter the world no longer existed.
Voices, slammed firedoors,
above and below, fear, the smell of burning fuel.

Then, in the dusty air of my savagely bright apartment I hovered over the body I'd lived in.

Fire-glass particles sparkled on the school roof

and the dazzle of charred steelwork
was a kind of blindness.

Triage stations, refrigerator lockers
—sound finished.
Rescuers and stunned residents under the dusty trees

remembered they were dust.

There is a blister on my mind.
I agree to that.

Moment as the plane, four blocks away,
turned, angling in—and I knew

they would be dead but I would live.

And so it is.

Time, a membrane
we both slipped through, into the next
moment when I could scream.

Personality swallowed itself to a nerve:

live.

I live
above the pit, the river
a gorgeous frame

for abundant new morning light.

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