2015 Alaska Literary Award
Fairbanks
Jill Osier is the author of three chapbooks of poems: Bedful of Nebraskas (2012), Should Our Undoing Come Down Upon Us White (winner of the 2013 Frost Place Chapbook Competition), and From (2016). Her work has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship, the George Bennett Fellowship, a Rasmuson Foundation Artist Award, and the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska.
A City You Keep
That night, walking home, I stopped to steal brass handles
off a desk left out by the curb. You waited, watching me work.
I think I always just needed a system.
This could explain most of it—the screws, the odd bits
of cloth, ugly shoes, the guts of that piano, its pieces exotic as peacocks.
You were a very large thing to happen.
Night fell, night after night, but the city never did,
and like a city you keep happening.
(Subtropics, Spring/Summer 2015)