Elaine Kahn and “any cold time”
Elaine Kahn is a poet, artist, and musician based in Los Angeles. Her books include Women in Public and Romance or The End, alongside earlier chapbooks. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and founded the Poetry Field School.
Issue 25 preserves “any cold time,” an early poem whose lake, Chicago, dirty sand, resin, leaves, wet logs, hips, and carpet create a small geography of memory. The poem’s brief turns keep moving from landscape toward intimacy and finally toward “the story’s floor,” where place and recollection settle into the same domestic image.
any cold time
any cold time
underneath the lake are
ears, clouds, handwater:
the Midwest.
dirty sand sewed in like a fat drop
sloped
to Chicago
(there is no gray like your gray)
kids and wet logs, slow
resin gets grained
and watching land
gets wide and unambiguous as hips.
leaves tap
hit slap.
any time
here
(we are getting to the carpet
we are getting to the story’s floor)
Books and later work
The Poetry Foundation records Kahn as the author of Women in Public and Romance or The End. Soft Skull Press documents her chapbooks, publications, teaching, and Los Angeles base, while UCLA English records her 2022 residency and teaching history.