A poem by Jay Hopler.
i will die in the desert on a sunny day
b/ci was born in the islands
in rainy weather
i will die in the desert this can’t be helped
maybe a Friday because today is a Friday at the beginning of
a cold spring
it will be a friday because today friday stoned and alone i drove
in the western desert and afflicted
my own death and never more than today do I feel
in the middle of a 2 lane road
empty for 1,000 years in both
directions
Jay Hopler is dead his life was as simple as it gets
And he had the scars to prove it
these are the witnesses: every Friday & the rains & the sun
& the road & every grain of sand
in this desert
Jay Hopler’s first book of poetry, green bean (2006), was chosen by Louise Glück as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize; his second collection, The Abbreviated History of Precipitation (2016), was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry. As an editor and translator, his work includes The Killing Spirit: Anthology of Murder for Hire (1998), Before God’s Door: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (edited with his wife, poet and Renaissance scholar Kimberly Johnson, 2013), and The Museum of Dark Little Things: 25 Poems by Georg Trakl (2016). The recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, two Florida Book Awards, and the Rome Prize in Literature, he lives with his family in Salt Lake City. .
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Thumbnail image by Glenn Malone via Flickr/CC.
