Dora Malech

Dora Malech Poems

Dora Malech Biography

Dora Malech grew up in Maryland, and earned a BA in Fine Arts from Yale and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her awards include a Clapp Fellowship from Yale, Capote and Teaching-Writing Fellowships from Iowa, a Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship, and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. Malech's poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry London, and elsewhere. She is the author of Shore Ordered Ocean (2010), and Say So (2011). Malech has taught writing at the University of Iowa; Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington, New Zealand; Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Augustana College; and Saint Mary’s College of California. She lives in Iowa City, where she writes, draws, teaches, and coordinates the Iowa Youth Writing Project, an arts outreach program for children and teens.)

The Best Poem Of Dora Malech

Delivery Rhyme

For Alyssa

As anyone
is apt to, you began as someone

else's symptom. As in
other beginnings: drawn lots, blood,
some dancing on the heads of pins

and inside needles' eyes,
cellular revelry,

hopping
of microscopic

turnstiles. Lucky guest,
grist, leapt

long odds to spark
the tinder in the dark.

Then, the subcommittees met:
made merry in duplicate, triplicate

and so on, much of themselves, divided
and divined and concurred.
All sides insides, pre-ambulatory
perambulation meant: sure

ambit, short orbit
in a warm aquarium set

to the muffled music of a single sphere.
As in other beginnings: parting seas, the future's
violent egress, screams and sutures,

aftermath's average agony
on umbilical belay

but soon to solo, unfold all
those origami limbs to test
the inevitable debutante bawl.

Wrest from the nest
and the rest is you, dear:
dressed for the bright lights
in bits of my sister.

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