Uncanny—the little shrine our friend Tanya’s grandfather built around his Virgin Mary statue, chairs pointed at it, a stone in each chair—maybe for the souls of great-grandparents—in New Jersey, where Walt Whitman lived like a long-horned sheep in a meadow wedged as a paper stopper for elderberry wine.

DAVID BLAIR was born in 1970. He grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and has degrees from Fordham University and the creative writing program at UNC Greensboro. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Fence, The Greensboro Review, The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Verse, and been featured in the anthologies Zoland Poetry and The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. He is an associate professor at The New England Institute of Art in Brookline, Massachusetts. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with his wife Sabrina and daughter Astrid.