Again and in the proper key, we are
The sound of a man’s back and the distance

That waits

And widens as he runs over us
Away from you, your screened porch,

And the glass of wine he dropped there,

Now a patch of splinters at your bare feet.
You could hurt yourself.  Be still

And listen.

There is no such thing as background music.
All day we’ve wanted this kind of attention,

But you were humming

A love song—then hoping to hear him
Sing the lyrics.  We wouldn’t dare let you
Out of the night without us.  Above us

You couldn’t even hear glass
Shatter, what you thought he held, broken.

Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston.    He also holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Dillard University.  The recipient of a Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, he has served as poetry editor at Gulf Coast and assistant poetry editor at Callaloo.  His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, New England Review, Oxford American, and several other journals and anthologies.  Brown teaches creative writing as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego.  New Issues Poetry & Prose published his first book PLEASE.