Colin Channer’s most recent book is the poetry collection Console (FSG, 2023). Born in Jamaica, and educated there and in New York, he teaches at Brown.
From a plastic Adirondack on the back deck of a cabin sealed once but abandoned to a splinter-shaggy-cinder-silver-gray, I’d watched day diminish as vision does when force on eye nerve bloats (vignetting) and I’d come through regimented grass...
Confusion is the foreigner’s advantage. Natives tamp the nuance in their sounds. Stranger seeking refuge pockets vowels, picks gesture, learns body, gets caught up on the cobble