Megan Alpert

Caught

Outside, the sea chews
the rocks to salt.
 
In the room, a crouching
extravagance: spilled silk,
a tumbled glass. The shower hums.
The room contracts.
 
Whose knuckles are they
that rattle in the glass?
Who jeweled
in the see-through night?
 
Outside, the sea
chooses carefully—
it does not sink
the city. It does not snuff the sun.
 
The old cries bead
across the surface of the glass.

Megan Alpert’s poetry has appeared in journals such as the Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, Sixth Finch, Green Mountains Review, and Contrary and has won an Orlando Poetry Prize. Her journalism has been published in The Guardian, Guernica Daily, Earth Island Journal, and Foreign Policy, where she is currently a fellow. She recently received a reporting fellowship from the International Women’s Media Foundation.