Amy Silbergeld and “Stain”
Amy Silbergeld is a poet, critic, and editor whose poetry appeared in journals including Fence and Gertrude. In 2012, The Rumpus identified her as the founder and editor-in-chief of DEATH HUMS and as an MFA candidate in poetry at Columbia University.
Issue 37 preserves “Stain,” a poem of distance, recollection, mirrors, dressing rooms, churches, hospitals, city lines, and the repeated effort to arrive at another person. The syntax keeps folding memory into movement, until the speaker reaches a doubled image of “you, me, a mirror, every time.”
Stain
I can come to miles easy
as away
is easy even occasionally
to wake halfway
through the night to
remember your skin(if I hadn’t lined up with the other prep school girls in the old dance room for
crested blazers and how-many-inches-is-your-waist-round skirts)if I had, and I have come into the same two-way mirrorcome dressing rooms
come churches
come hospitals
I have found myself in
the corners of my eyes as
black and dry some mornings
I have been silt, come
miles here walking
accidentally into backroom charcoal burn to find you
I have come nervously made up with brown and torn stockings on
city lines to find you, me, a mirror, every time
Poetry and criticism
The Rumpus preserves Silbergeld’s review of Sally Keith’s The Fact of the Matter together with a contributor note recording her poetry publications, editorial work, and graduate study.