#MIDDLEBURY
Utopian
Alicia Ostriker
My neighbor’s daughter has created a city
you cannot see
on an island to which you cannot swim
ruled by a noble princess and her athletic consort
all the buildings are glass so that lies are impossible
beneath the city they have buried certain words
which can never be spoken again
chiefly the word divorce which is eaten by maggots
when it rains you hear chimes
rabbits race through its suburbs
the name of the city is one you can almost pronounce
About this poem
“The inspiration for this poem came from something my friend told me about her grown daughter’s creative projects, to which I added fantasies of my own. I think the utopian impulse is generated partly by distress at the world as it is, and partly by something childish (in my case girlish) or even infantile in us, some memory of a time when everything was okay. Of course, the poem says you can’t get there from here-though it can seem so close.” -Alicia Ostriker
About Alicia Ostriker
Alicia Ostriker is the author of “The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog” (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014). She teaches in Drew University’s low-residency program in poetry and poetry in translation and splits her time between Princeton, N.J., and New York City.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Alicia Ostriker. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
