Jordan Silversmith is a novelist, critic, and translator in New York.
His first novel, Redshift, Blueshift, won the Gival Press Novel Prize. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Baffler, Jewish Fiction, and Half Mystic, where "The Sevdah Machine" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He writes criticism for Asymptote, where he is a contributing editor, VAN Magazine, I Care If You Listen, and the Chicago Review of Books. His translation of Paulo Leminski's Catatau — the great untranslated novel of the Brazilian avant-garde — is forthcoming in excerpt from Words Without Borders.
Thanksgiving
The fox is in his shadow. I am under the hill.
A loose sense of things metastasizes
And we are suddenly shifted to another key,
The barley thick round here this time of year.
Desire, like fire and water,
A faithful servant and a willful master.
There is always a cleaving and a burning
No less than there is fleshlessness:
We are bound to what we love, body after body,
Each turning in the sun for days
And then incandescing in another way, seen
In other ways: and then we will speak star to star.
These late days
Are brilliant in their ardor, a latent pallor
So distant from the sun, so pure
In their desuetude. Nighttime comes with the hush
Of expectation, but what we waited for was pure,
Was nothing at all.