BILDUNGSROMAN

I have nothing
but small drawings
to tell me what
I have loved 

The sunset
mushroomed
into fine powder
I’m here
to assemble it

We broke through
each other’s arms
and it was clear
our game had ended

The grass
felt damp 

I began
to grow up
in the dusk

Next door
the deaf boy
made everything
appear
with his hands

*

Ashley Seitz Kramer has won numerous awards including the Ruth Stone Prize, the Schiff Prize, the Utah Writers’ Contest, and the Zone 3 Press First Book Award in Poetry for her book, Museum of Distance (2015). Her work is widely published in such places as Cimarron Review, The Burnside Review, Anti-, Parcel, Brevity, Western Humanities Review, Colorado Review, Quarterly West, The Southeast Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Hunger Mountain. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College and a PhD from the University of Utah. She lives in Salt Lake City.