Beauty is made my fear

A few notes on a misprinted poem by Laura Jensen

What slips from me is what
slips from me. Slippage
is the hinge on which my life

hinges. When the text
emerges with a mark missing,
I kiss it. The error ablates

the face I was making
when making it. Eros, a mistake.
When I faced it, I lost it.

When it slipped from me,
it slipped from me, and I let it
slip from me: errant tear.

Author of the article

Jane Huffman is the author of Public Abstract, winner of the 2023 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. She is a doctoral student in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Poetry Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She was a 2019 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She is currently associate editor at Denver Quarterly. Instagram: @somuchdepends