Eric Pankey is the author of several poetry collections, including For the New Year, selected by Mark Strand as the winner of the 1984 Walt Whitman Award; Apocrypha; The Pear as One Example; and Trace (2013). Born in Kansas City in 1959, Pankey received his BA from the University of Missouri and an MFA from the University of Iowa. He is the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University and lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.


Photograph by Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

Three Poems

by Eric Pankey

Essay on a Lemon

Like a lens, the lemon clarifies by way of distortion. Like a mirror, the lemon implies an unseen onlooker. The lemon, transformed by one’s attention to it, is a spark pent up in a barn, is tenuous auroral light, is long shadows on a glacier. The lemon waits to be recognized like the inscrutable event of a miracle. The lemon is like a nail before the hammer’s invention. One experiences the mystical as the phenomenal.

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