Miss America | Mark Strand | The New York Review of Books

Submit a letter:

I have no hope.
I sit in a log cabin
somewhere, surrounded by washing machines
and bottles of beer.

You enter dancing,
your skin sailing around your bones,
the soup of your system drowning your thoughts,
your thoughts crying “Help!”….”Don’t Help!”

Only for you
is death a dream.
Meat flies into your mouth
like sunlight, Miss America,

you are never full,
your fat is like the flag,
it hangs between you and the world.
That is why I have given you this.

Mark Strand

Mark Strand, who died late last year, was a poet and artist. He was named Poet Laureate of the United States in 1990 and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1999. (June 2015)

This Issue

April 24, 1969