Cori Winrock’s poems seem endless; or perhaps a better word would be boundaryless. Even her shorter poems expand not only beyond their conclusions, but expand as they are read—each word is a way in and a way out. In this way—and it is a bit of a paradox, because what I am saying is that her poems seem to take up an unusual amount of space—Cori Winrock’s poems make the world bigger. The poems are filters, but things coming out are bigger than they were going in.

How does she accomplish this? Mostly, I think, by utilizing a mode I am going to call the mode of the objectless address. In “Landscape in which I Am Obliterated by Light,” for example, the speaker appears to be addressing someone or something called “Little Sleeve,” but Little Sleeve, having no particular named qualities of their own (other than possible sleeviness), works as a mirror, and everything the speaker says bounces off Little Sleeve and out toward the world, so that “Landscape in which I Am Obliterated by Light” becomes a poem both about the self and not about the self, both addressed to and not addressed to a specific other, and although the world ultimately receives the poem that has bounced off Little Sleeve, because there is no intended recipient in the world other than Little Sleeve, the poem can only expand into a world with no container for it—it is added to all things, but is encompassed by none.

That is what Winrock’s poems do—they add; they are not encompassed.

—Shane McCrae, contest judge


Landscape in which I Am Obliterated by Light
“. . . innocent sleep, / Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care.”

Nothing fits properly in this space, Little Sleeve.
Are you watching? The way I am crawling across

the walls of every room of the house like a wet
near-dead thing. Like the sad sack that I am.

Little sleeve, the dead are everywhere
in my poems & I’ve forgotten the living

body is a necessary antecedent
to landscape. Landscape of unfreezing cells,

of new ringing forests; landscape of remorseless
heat & dry light. Little sleeve, spring is coming

coming & dragging its thaw & snow-shedding
stink. Little sleeve, the yard is dismantling its panoptic

mantling of white. & I want to be sucked into
the mud’s black hole vacuum instead of mapping

our way to another doctor. I swear I once heard someone
say there are only so many images a body can take

before the skeleton is stolen in light. Is it a given
that every TV emergency ends

in joyous resuscitation? Little sleeve, I left
my teenage bones to winter

as x-rays in a folder in a drawer.
There is a run in the quietness

of every pair of my stockings.
Little sleeve, so many bodies are denied

as bodies. & your body is not even.
We are animals, are being resurrected from DNA,

& the youngest ever brain frozen for a new body
to be built for her 500 years into a future.

Little sleeve, Is this really what we call saving?
Across an ocean drones are banqueting

as bees as bombs in bridal arrangements
& we call this progress. The satellites are monitoring

our devolving.  Little sleeve, How does love appear
in no gravity? Like love, like love.

Little sleeve, no one has told me what happens
when I reemerge to a thawing
earth. What happens when a daughter returns
from the underworld to the exact moment. The exact

same grove of known trees. But no mother. No child.
Little sleeve-of-her-own-accord. Little ravel:

I’ve dug up the bulb of our girlhood
body from the frozen yard as if everything stays

perennial. As if aster rather than ash. I’ve buried
our hands in my mouth. Little sleeve, always

on the cusp of these two bright emergency
rooms, Demeter’s gorgeous force

on the brink. Come & get me, I’d like to hear myself
say: to be contagious: to be uncontained.

Little sleeve, you are distilled to a certificate
we signed before we could leave the hospital

with your sister. Little little, sing
to me. Little little, sleeve me

tender. My throat is worn slender
as a seam, my heart gone to seed.

Little, it’s impossible to turn around
to tell if what is spilling from us is water or salt

or star. Little sleeve, your legs are dragging behind me.
I swear nothing will fit in this spacesuit but us.

What Would Happen to Your Body in Space Without a Spacesuit
“What you say, you say in a body; you can say nothing outside of this body.”

Whose foreheads should we kiss to check for fever,
whose memories are those that we keep

so close to our wrists. The stars are only us
before us, afforded by so much distance.

We have drawn pictures of such animals
we have never seen. We have become such sky

-slung animals in our most untender moments.
Our bodies have been exposed to all sorts of things.

The stars don’t believe in weeping us
to sleep or singing us into a new season.

In space we imagine we are holding each other
by the hand instead of holding our own hands

over our mouths. To grieve, to be grieving—
no one is going to come tell us it’s not safe

to be holding our breath. We learn to sleep
with our hands in the dark

of strangers’ mouths, keep our heads singing
in hopes of bringing our lost

helmets back. How warmblooded
the moon must still seem when seen from the earth.

Elegy as Yichud Room

The mountains wallpaper the city
                        in snow, in not-another-

word: O faceted animals
                        in whiteshift, what mars-scape

is this? Our bodies pinned
                        open into the last kind blues

                                    of Nyquil. I have nothing to say

about what the moon is doing

             now, or to this unendingly ghostless
                        house. Or to you, who have taken

to recreating our expected life
                        in diminuendos—tiny us

             with newborns, tiny us with so little
                        light—for shame for shame.

To reappear in the salt
              lake and to know the right

meaning—. What is a house
              but a syllable that accumulates

                      our fleece. Adonai, the moon is cutting
its teeth on our bedroom floor.

How underwhelming its apprehensive
                      face, how glozing.

Adonai, we’ve been sleeping
                      on top of the covers like dollhouse

               lovers. I’ve untucked all seven doors
                                   from their hinges—laid them down

as benedictions.         Love, let us unbreak
               and unbreak every lightbulb left

                     in its threads, as if we might be allowed
              to pass through these walls, circle

back to the before of each other.

Microchimera as Lullaby

Shush, little bones, still in your first ring
of growth—the skeleton, singing
its diminutives: good night nobody
good night mush. It’s tone-dark in the body
of the woods—the map marked with Xs
that multiply & hide—genetics’ convex
revision: all night you’ve been sleepcrawling
through the walls—pitching, yawing. Darling,
don’t say a word—I’ve rubbed our ghosts
raw as the floorboards, grafted us—almost.
The sonographer’s doppler: a canary—
the bloodhush warbling its own obituary.
I dream your buried X-rays as errata—& you:
a bur in my cells: a fermata. 

Polaroid Ode

O four-cornered room
in which we tuck the ever-
developing light of our warm
bodies. O snapshot, O ether
-ized flash of childhood—swarm
of chemicals murmuring together
to form empty sky, exposing
day’s blue dissolve from blue.
O bad 70s plaid sofas
& pearl snapshirts, costumes
fading like fisher-price cars
on washed-out lawns. O moon
boots without stars.
O family re-gathering as light-
seep, as grief. O ablation
& emulsion & actual moon—
you day-lurker, you—
balloon I imagine deflating
above our duplex—why the resistance?
Tell me who was in our living room
to capture this instant, whose hand
was shaking us into existence.