Issue > Poetry

Lauren Hilger

Lauren Hilger was named the 2012 Nadya Aisenberg Fellow from the MacDowell Colony. Her poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Green Mountains Review, and Harvard Review Online among other journals. She lives and works in Manhattan.

Exotica

In his early films, someone's always
hungry, someone drives in silence,
the handsome hero puts his hands
on his wife's head so she'll stop spinning.
The surprise machine eats her quarter,
an egg becomes. As the Met is fooled
the acquisition is real. As she won't
look directly into the photograph of the sun.
Belief becomes her. She builds a speech
of darting across the red street. He sits
down as if coming from an awful hunting
accident. As Teddy Roosevelt's
horns, mounted tusks, African coats
become things one shouldn't covet.