Noah Falck
THE ROOM WHERE YOU LEARNED TO DANCE
was painted red
someone said
fire inspired the song
and your body moved
like it suffered
it suffered
like it moved
the song over
the room
where you
learned to dance
after Edouard Vuillard's "Le peintre Ker-Xavier Roussel et sa fille"
RED ROVER
We send clouds over.
You say ‘the sky
is a machine-washed thing,”
and send over another language.
It smokes like a minefield.
Like the memory of a grandfather
pinned to a recliner after the war.
We send over the last light of afternoon,
and let it rug the gardens.
You plant a tree and think a forest’s
worth of thought. No surprise
when the future rendezvous at sunset.
Everything eye-level and Olympic.
About the author
Noah Falck is the author of Exclusions (Tupelo Press, 2020) which was a finalist for the Believer Book Award for poetry and the co-authored collection Prerecorded Weather (SurVision Books, 2022) winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize. In 2013, he founded the Silo City Reading Series, a multimedia poetry event series that takes place inside a 120-foot-high, 100-year-old abandoned grain elevator. He lives in Buffalo, New York. Read more at noahfalck.org and find on instagram @noahfalck.