Carrie Bennett is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow and author of biography of water (The Word Works) and several chapbooks: The Quiet Winter (Dancing Girl), Animals in Pretty Cages (Dancing Girl), and Expedition Notes (Letter [r] Press). Her second full-length collection, The Land Is a Painted Thing, was selected by Kimiko Hahn for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection and will be published in 2016. Poems from her newest poetic project, Expedition Notes, have appeared or are forthcoming in Anchor, Horse Less Review, Pangyrus, Salamander, Small Po[r]tions, and Timber. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was a Maytag Fellow. She teaches writing at Boston University and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with her family.
Before I knew you
I knew your home before
you lived there
before I saw
the pear tree’s
bright leaves before
they fell before my first
winter before I was
another person before
before I took
the picture
of the pear
tree’s bright
leaves against—
before I knew
there was
a before