April 11
	THE POET LAUREATE OF DENVER
	chris ransick
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	THE WOUNDING MOMENT
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	Don't try to tell me now we were otherwise kind to the girl. Such lies mock both the truth and what we've become since with our accumulated years. I know I will walk backward through nightmares forever, trying but unable to catch her tears in my outstretched palm. When you tormented her that day at the woods' edge, summer sky stormed because your words curdled clouds. Yes, she was fat, and her skin raw with blemishes. I flinched when she raised her head, red-rimmed eyes fierce, and learned from her how to speak none of it. I was, as always, captive in my little-brotherness to you, my captain, but I disowned you there with the sunlight glinting off your blond hair, all your beauty still somehow less than her anger, sheathed.
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	about the poem
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	"The Wounding Moment" strikes me as a pretty visceral poem when I read it, which may be a weird thing to say, since I wrote it. It's not authbiographical in any strict sense. I was reacting to the fact that too often, we romanticize the world of children. You'd have to be lying to yourself in a big way to not recognize how savage kids can be to one another. I learned many such lessons as a witness, courtesy of my older brothers, and some of the imagery burned itself into me. I used such an image and built these characters around it.
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	about the poet
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	Chris Ransick, Denver's poet laureate, won a Colorado Book Award in 2003 for his first book, Never Summer. His collection of short stories, A Return to Emptiness, was a finalist for a 2005 Colorado Book Award. In 2006 he published his most recent collection, Lost Songs & Last Chances, winner of the Colorado Authors' League Award for poetry. He has recent and forthcoming work in Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, The Notre Dame Review, Pilgrimage, and The Paterson Literary Review, and is currently at work on a new collection of poetry titled Asleep Beneath the Hill of Dreams. A native of New York, Chris has lived in Montana, Wyoming, California, and Colorado, working as a reporter, editor, and professor. He holds master's degrees in journalism and creative writing and served as assistant to the editors of the definitive anthology, The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology. He is a member of PEN USA's Freedom to Write Committee, an international organization that works to free authors and journalists in other countries who have been imprisoned for their writings. Closer to home, Chris was a long-time member of his local public library board and has worked in his community to support literacy and freedom of expression and to organize and support a variety of literary events.
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