Best Poems from "Late Wife" by Claudia Emerson

"... and that champagne can be kept effervescent by putting/ a knife in the open mouth of the bottle."

"I grew up around/ women who would kill any snake... snakes are kept/ in bright glass cells--a whole wall of them, a live/ mural glistening, changing--the harmless/ by the deadly... The snake never/ raised its head. I hesitated, then/ eased shut the drawer... I know now I should have killed the snake/ and hung its long body as straight in death/ as the glistening barrel of a gun."

"Sometimes a name/ called out, a cough, a laugh will echo here--our voices/ in the hollows of their bodies, for now, sustained."

"What had we saved/ for a world so alien, the waxwing/ must have believed it had died in those rooms/ where for a while we went on living."

"Though I have felt the cold air/ of this disappearance before, each time the aura/ deceives me to believe reality itself/ has failed. I fear this more than what it warns/ because I cannot remember I will survive it.