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Jeff Hipsher

I bring the water to bed, to cool my sheets / to fill the space where he would be


What it Takes to Hold a Shark

The space around our home
grows into a long, arduous thing.

Gibberish mostly. And finds its way
into the hot set of newspaper and couch cushions

prepared by teams of badgers, cooperating
under our back porch. What they don't know,

or what I refuse to tell them is, at night, when I wash my face
I don't dry it. I bring the water to bed, to cool my sheets

to fill the space where he would be, if he were available
or prepared even, to change us both from these creatures

and bring us, slowly, into the alley, like the cables
who meet there in anticipation of the singularity


Jeff Hipsher's work has previously appeared in or is forthcoming from The Boston Review, Phoebe, Forklift : Ohio, iO: A Journal of New American Poetry, TOAD, Phantom Limb, Leveler and others. Poems will also appear in the coming anthology It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip-Hop. He is the founding editor of Catch Up (www.catch-up.us), a journal of comics and literature. An MFA candidate at Florida State University, he lives in Tallahassee, Florida.