Kristin W. Davis (kristinwdavis.com) has lived 41 years in the DC area, including the past 27 years in Cleveland Park in Northwest DC. She is a graduate of American University, worked as a writer and editor for 20 years with Kiplinger’s Magazine, and recently earned an MFA from the University of Southern Maine, Stonecoast. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Nimrod, and other journals, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is a 2024 and 2025 grantee of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship Program.
Awaiting Bent Light
There is a kind of seeing that stumbles in the dark,
stubs a toe, hurries on before eyes can adjust,
a kind of seeing that wears a hood to hide
its face, loses its peripheral vision,
a kind of seeing that sits stiff-
spined, back not touching the chair.
A kind of seeing that goes grayscale,
that intensifies both shadow and light,
like the first shiver of leaves, the first
thickening of sky that will snuff sun,
fragile, like a soap bubble, you watch
the refraction, hoping it will last.
There is a kind of seeing that hovers like first
notes, a song you might sing along to,
a kind of sudden seeing that upends
everything, that even after the clarity,
evaporates. A kind of seeing that anticipates,
that smells of hard rain, that swirls like snow
in a globe, that stills in the eddy of the centrifuge.
That seeing, it turns its palms upward and waits.
Sandra Beasley is the curator of “Poetic Hill,” a resident of Southwest, and the author of four poetry collections. If you live in D.C. and you’re interested in being featured, you can reach her at [email protected] for questions and submissions (1-5 poems).
