BOOKS

Site Specific

Published by Grid Books | May 2025
ISBN: 978-1-946830-38-8

A Shape that Stands Up and Listens,

Let the cylinder of red sit still, be
a stand in, a fire-engine or Venetian
red, so particular, so intentional,
it singes one side of the page,
where you’d touch it to turn it
if this were a book, a red, particular
to you, and no one else. And this
yellow: assertive, could be a safety,
or cyber yellow, boxed in black bars.
A door? over which strokes like oars are
held up in ease or surrender, paused
over a lake, a dark eddy, in mid-
conversation, paired with another
below, its shadow, a place to glide over
(or into): water? or waste? a pause of
pale blue, nearly grey—a not-sunny
day. Ditto, below, the left side
of a quotation, a single mark, as if
the shape is quoting herself—a start,
or a stop twinned with almost-a-boat,
whose screened-in bottom makes her
a risk to step into, uneasy, but open.
This barely-a-boat wants, also, to be
a quote, a pitch to row into, like
the quiet-but-bright white, right
here, a thought, an anchor that
aspires to speak, but also to listen.

after Amy Sillman