Despite furnaced trees
translating heaven, always
it comes, kneeling to nothing:
the angry, occult hoar of dread.
My service is to pay it
no mind, and pray that evil,
like cold, if it exists, is just
a bloodless absence of heat
or motion or capacity for change.
There’s a story within this story,
shackled at ankles by your fists—
wreathes, tetherings, call them
by any silvered, mirroring name.
Flames, they hold my feet to home.
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From Soul Cake by Lisa Russ Spaar. Copyright © 2026. Available from Persea Books.
Lisa Russ Spaar
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author/editor of fourteen books, most recently Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems (Persea Books, 2021) and a debut novel, Paradise Close (Persea Books; 2022; paperback 2025). A new collection of poems, Soul Cake (Persea Books) will appear on May 5, 2026. Her short fiction and lyric essays have appeared in Literary Imagination, The American Scholar, The Yale Review, The Big Other, and elsewhere. Her honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Prize for Poetry, and a NEH Distinguished Professorship. She is professor of English at the University of Virginia, where for many years she directed the Creative Writing Program.
