m e g    m a t i c h

from Cold

Cold

Cold

Cold

Cold

Cold

Cold

Imagine the moon
coated in snow

calving
from its surface.

Avalanche
to the earth, midnight
to the sea.

next

Cold

Arctic fox,

    I have seen you
flare your wings

as you dive
                 in and out
    of snow drifts.
        You flicker,
obscured

and realized
                 obliquely. 
    Your downy
         feathers

    stiffen
with rime.
   You believe
in the strength
                 of the leap

that comes next.

next

Cold

The small sky
weighted down,
a canopy

heavy with wild

plums

and the larder

overfull
with seal
meat.

next

Cold

How can I know
the mechanisms
in a barometer

as well as I know
the argot
of thieves.

next

Cold

We are miraculously old,
sheaves of wheat,
volcanic ice.

next

Meg Matich is an NYC-based poet and translator whose work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Drunken Boat, alice blue review, OVS Magazine, Contrary, and The Rumpus, among others. Her erasure chapbook/artbook, The litter of rose leaves, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Her translations from Icelandic have appeared on Catch & Release, and she is currently curating an Icelandic poetry feature for Words Without Borders with an emphasis on emerging, female poets. In 2014, her work was shortlisted for the Iowa Review Poetry Prize and for a creative-writing Fulbright grant to Iceland. She has worked variously with Festival Neue Literatur and the German Book Office/Goethe Institut, been a resident translator at Banff International Literary Translation Centre, and is currently completing her MFA theses in Columbia University's MFA program. Meanwhile, she works with the masterminds of the Emerging Literary Translators Network of America. In her spare time, she obsesses over languages and travels widely, aspiring someday to discover the hyperborean land of Thule and speak a secret, private language.

Her alter ego, Ynga Fagrkinn, has been known to skulk around the Poetry Brothel, luring visitors to watery deaths on the rocks (of poetry), and to hang out at STORY peddling poems to passersby on Valentine's Day.

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