Aria Aber

Aria Aber was raised in Germany. Her debut book Hard Damage won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was published in September 2019. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Poem-A-Day, Narrative, Muzzle Magazine, Wasafiri and elsewhere. A graduate from the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, where she was the Writers in Public Schools Fellow, she holds awards and fellowships from Kundiman, Dickinson House, and the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She is the recipient of a 2020 Whiting Award in Poetry and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. She is at work on a novel and a second book of poems. Source

First Snow

How easy for snow to turn to ice, for snow

to disappear the light from the ragged

frame of chestnut trees around the warehouse

by what’s left of wild chicory, scraped

sculptures, weeping dogbane. Hunger borders

this land, while snow turns all to immigrants,

snow salts the embankment, where turtles wash ashore,

literally hundreds of them, frozen hard

like grenades of tear gas thrown across

a barbwire fence. But who of their free

will would ever want to climb that fence

to live here, who would pray each night

for grace, hoping to pass through the darkened veil

of [ ], to bear witness to smokestacks,

wild champion, knapweed? Who’d loiter around cricks

glistening with oil, which, once gone,

will, like death, at last, democratize

us all? On potato sacks in the snowcapped,

abandoned warehouse, there huddle and sit

the soiled refugees, bereft, cow-eyed,

picking dirt off their scalps, their shelled soles.

Among them, wordless, is my mother,

and nestled on her lap is I, in love with the light

of the first snow of my life, so awed

and doubtful still of what lengths the frost wills

to go, and what shape it will then take—

Published:

2020

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Immigration

Nature