From Invisible Bride

by Tony Tost

We’re always shoulder to shoulder: you over there, me in here, singing, holding an apple and a knife and you’re staring at your wrists: I’m mock-serious (with my knife, knife, knife) and full of ordinary secrets, and you’re over there, next to me, with your thousand and one shadows as I, up here (under you) trace the shadows with this knife that you kept, for luck, in your room.

I found it.


Tony Tost is completing his MFA at the University of Arkansas. His work has appeared in the pages of Fence and Spinning Jenny. Tost also co-edits Octopus, to be launched in August.

Tony Tost’s Invisible Bride was recently selected by C. D. Wright as the winner of the 2003 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. We’re pleased to be able to present three poems from Invisible Bride, two of which were previously published in storySouth, and one new poem from a project Tost calls “Dead Birds.”

Invisible Bride will be published by LSU Press in 2004. In the meantime, you may enjoy more of Tost’s poems elsewhere on the web:

“I Am Not the Pilot” at The Cortland Review
One untitled poem at Canwehaveourballback?
“Twelve Self-Portraits” at Typo Magazine