Memye Curtis Tucker

Memye Curtis Tucker is the author of The Watchers (Ohio University, 1998), which won the Hollis Summers Prize, and poems in Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Georgia Review, Oxford American Review, and Southern Review. A former Senior Editor of Atlanta Review, she holds a PhD in English Literature. Her fourth chapbook, A Net to Hold the Wind, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publishing.

Atlantis

After Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis)
—Robert Smithson, Dia:Beacon, N.Y.

Shimmering glass fragments fall
against each other, rise from the smooth
floor like blue-green mountains

heaped into the outline of an island
hidden beneath an ocean. Atlantis:
longing dreamed into memory.

Yet who could have guessed?
Beside the glistening mound
for an instant I almost believed.

Tonight, in a closed gallery,
an imagined world will drown again
in a lake of trembling air

while above Atlantis, Leonids
streak the net of gridded windows
in a stuttered falling,

breaking the night
into gone
and gone.