Tanya Muzumdar

Tanya Muzumdar teaches at North Central Michigan College and also works as a freelance book editor. Her poems appear in Cherry Tree, Cimarron Review, Nashville Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Thrush Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. A former senior editor of Dunes Review, Tanya has also been a writer-in-residence at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.

In Private

Their names appeared together in public.
One was a red cellar door, the other a swing.

Mornings he lit the burner, a rose bloomed in the center.
She cooked them a branch.

One was a votive; the other, an elbow.
In the stove, paper burnt to gray carnations.

Outside the window shaped like a cabin, the straits flowed.
The merganser swam left. The merganser swam right.

She read of gondoliers wearing candle hats.

One was a map; the other, a zodiac.
Nights, they faced one another, near, untouching.

One was a still, black fly. The other, a spider dried to pollen on the screen.
Time hardened to metal between them.

Deep in the day, the lake: propane-blue.

His hat rocked in the waves. She rowed away.
The merganser simmered and dove.