Aaron Smith's new collection, PRIMER, is due from Pitt on October 5 of this year. Here's a dead-on comment from Tracy K. Smith about Aaron's work: "Aaron Smith is an expert at locating the spaces within spaces. ...he zeroes in on the places where doubt and possibility collide and unsettle our beliefs. (His poems) are graceful, full of humility and hard fact, and they aren’t afraid... Tracy actually went on to write that his poems weren't afraid to laugh, but I've ended her quote there because the poem I'm publishing here (its first appearance, I'm proud to say) is a fearless one indeed, charged by a dark and wounded beauty. Still Life with a Hundred Crucifixions
I
never talked to men
after
sex, just got dressed
and
left, but he asked me to stay,
naked
like that on the bed—
even
after we’d gotten off,
toweled
off—so I stayed,
though
I was afraid to see him
as a
person: his face tired
in
the lamplight, suddenly older
than
his on-line pic. He pulled
a
book from the shelf: Jesus
on
every page, rendered in oil
from
other centuries, hungry
and
sad, scrawny and hammered
to
different-sized crosses, or thrown—
full
color—in a tomb.
What is that shade of blue? Look
at the detail in the hands.
He
took my hand, placed it
on
each slick image:
How did the painter make his eyes
look like that?
What makes someone’s eyes look
like that?
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