about the author

Brianna Noll is the author of The Price of Scarlet (University Press of Kentucky, 2017), which was named one of the top poetry books of 2017 by the Chicago Review of Books. She is poetry editor of The Account, which she helped found, and her poems and translations have appeared widely in journals, including the Kenyon Review Online, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, and Waxwing. She lives in Los Angeles.


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One Poem 

Brianna Noll



Promise Old as Sleep Itself

In this baroque
candlelight the shape
of reason is a
hollowed saint
cheekbone a future
relic now artful
shadow. In daylight
things will be
clearer messier
consecrated in holy
oil but for the time
being let’s let
ecstatic unrelenting
possibility surround
us a chiaroscuro
woodcut’s warm red
and blue impressions.
There’s nothing to
fear something will
wake us before
dawn a portent
a knife a splash
of turpentine this
lucid mare trampled
dream you and I
share our life
in tandem. Don’t
brush it off let
me brush it off twice
now I woke you
whimpering
in my sleep and each
time you asked what’s
wrong I said still
asleep, oh. Oh, it’s
nothing. Nothing.





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