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My brother builds a wall of airplane glue around his bed, the fumes become

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Some Ether

Some Ether

Nick Flynn

Graywolf Press

Copyright

Copyright © 2000 by Nick Flynn

Publication of this volume is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Significant support has also been provided by the Bush Foundation; Dayton’s, Mervyn’s, and Target stores through the Dayton Hudson Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Additional funding for this title was provided by the Jerome Foundation.

Special funding for this title was provided by a grant from the Greenwall Fund of The Academy of American Poets.

Published by Graywolf Press

250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-55597-303-2

Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-934-8

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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-067244

Cover design by Scott Sorenson

Cover photograph by Marian Roth

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following journals and anthologies where certain of these poems, sometimes in earlier versions, first appeared:

ARK/angel Review: “Sudden,” “Some Ether,” “And Then, And Then,” “Curse”

The Marlboro Review: “God Forgotten”

Mudfish: “Angelization”

The Nation: “Bag of Mice,” “Cartoon Physics, part 1”

New England Review: “Flashback”

Painted Bride Quarterly: “Ago,” “Trickology,” “Residue”

The Paris Review: “Fragment (found inside my mother)”

Passages North: “Flood,” “Worthless”

Pierogi Press: “Salt,” “My Mother Contemplating Her Gun”

Ploughshares: “You Ask How,” “Emptying Town”

Provincetown Arts: “Father Outside”

Shankpainter: “The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands,” “Prayer,” “Elsewhere, Mon Amour,” “The cellar a machine whirring through the night,” “Splenectomy,” “Twenty-Pound Stone,” “The Robot Moves!”

The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review: “1967”

Talula: “No Map”

Third Coast: “Wild with Dandelions & Roses,” “Seven Fragments (found inside my father)”

“Sudden” also appeared in What Have You Lost?, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye, published by Greenwillow Books, 1999.

“Peach” appeared in Cape Discovery: The Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Anthology, edited by Bruce Smith and Catherine Gammon, published by Sheep Meadow Press, 1994.

“Bag of Mice,” “Emptying Town,” “Cartoon Physics, part 1,” and “Cartoon Physics, part 2” also appeared in The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology, edited by Michael Collier, published by the University Press of New England, 2000.