Queer Poem-a-Day is a program from the Adult Services Department at the Library and may include adult language.
Before & After
by S. Brook Corfman
At the entrance the horse turns red, turns
left, and the flowers share her color. Beneath glass.
The museum is closed, but fast-forward
and I will tell you the exhibit underwhelms me, how on a streaming service
you can place the cursor over a later point in time
and see a still of what comes next
without committing—it’s like that. There’s no past or future
but the present and then the traces, indications, etc. Or it’s like
when a single example is exceptional to the rest—I’m annoyed
but reinforced in my love of that exception.
In an early poem Adrienne Rich writes
“Time in the hand is not control of time,” and bless early poems
for their uncertain ends. What do we miss if we write only “after”?
The odds rise up like spider lilies, like each version
of a mark on paperwhite. Rich thought change was the only poem,
but that only some things could be changed—gender, for example,
could not, but I still want to approach each possible version
of myself. Clouds move toward one another, they are so heavy,
no really they weigh millions of pounds over the figure
standing with arms spread out like a landscape, like
from faraway, like a person standing in the middle of the line.
Copyright © 2025 by S. Brook Corfman. This poem was originally published in a slightly different form in Pigeon Pages (2020).
About the Author
S. Brook Corfman is the author of My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites, one of The New York Times Best Poetry Books of 2020, finalist for the Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature, and winner of the Fordham University Press POL Prize, chosen by Cathy Park Hong. She is also the author of the poetry collection Luxury, Blue Lace, chosen by Richard Siken for the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, and several chapbooks. In 2024 she received the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America.
Queer Poem a Day
Queer Poem-a-Day is founded and co-directed by poet and professor Lisa Hiton and Dylan Zavagno, Adult Services Coordinator at the Library and host of the Deerfield Public Library Podcast. Music for this fifth year of our series is “L’Ange Verrier” from Le Rossignol Éperdu by Reynaldo Hahn, performed by pianist Daniel Baer. Queer Poem-a-Day is supported by generous donations from the Friends of the Deerfield Public Library and the Deerfield Fine Arts Commission.
