Each Wednesday, Editor's Choice brings you a poem from a new book selected as a must-read. Our feature editor this week is Eric Pankey.
Arthur Sze
I’m walking in sight of the Río Nambé—

salt cedar rises through silt in an irrigation ditch—

the snowpack in the Sangre de Cristos has already dwindled before spring—

at least no fires erupt in the conifers above Los Alamos—

the plutonium waste has been hauled to an underground site—

a man who built plutonium triggers breeds horses now—

no one could anticipate this distance from Monticello—

Jefferson despised newspapers, but no one thing takes us out of ourselves—

during the Cultural Revolution, a boy saw his mother shot by a firing squad—

a woman detonates when a spam text triggers bombs strapped to her body—

when I come to an upright circular steel lid, I step out of the ditch—

I step out of the ditch but step deeper into myself—

I arrive at a space that no longer needs autumn or spring—

I find ginseng where there is no ginseng my talisman of desire—

though you are visiting Paris, you are here at my fingertips—

though I step back into the ditch, no whitening cloud dispels this world’s mystery—

the ditch ran before the year of the Louisiana Purchase—

I’m walking on silt, glimpsing horses in the field—

fielding the shapes of our bodies in white sand—

though parallel lines touch in the infinite, the infinite is here—
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"MY LIFE"
 
Read and listen to Matthew Zapruder's poem “My Life,” a reflection on love and family, in this week's issue of The New Yorker.

via THE NEW YORKER 
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WHAT SPARKS POETRY:
J. MICHAEL MARTINEZ
ON RAINER MARIA RILKE'S
"[YOU WHO NEVER ARRIVED]"

"Rilke’s unpublished missive to a distant beloved became an archetype for much of my sense of the poetic: an epistle (in)to the unknown fueled by a compassion that comprehends radical otherness as an aspect of the self exceeding the self."
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