Too Cold For Clouds

Anna Rosen Guercio

I ache to name something “too cold for clouds:”
a children's book, a cocktail, a postrock song.

Recalcitrant walls, I always thought
she was singing as I would have sung.

Sung early to early to bed to bed,
and form to bring to being.

Sung charms against chase against being held
accountable for stories for keeping accounts.

Expressive after all after a fashion to fall,
to create an audience as much as find or be.

As simple as a repertoire,
I'd be armed to sing against a sea.


Anna Rosen Guercio is a translator and poet living in Los Angeles. Her work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from The Kenyon Review Online, Pool, The St Petersburg Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, inter|rupture, Prime Number, Eleven Eleven, Faultline, Entasis, and Words Without Borders. She is the translator of José Eugenio Sánchez's Suite Prelude a/H1N1, published by Toad Press. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Irvine.