This week’s poem, Myronn Hardy’s “Threshold with Fog,” conjures a hazy state of dislocation and betweenness. I love this poem’s vivid, dream-like imagery, and how it cross-fades between scenes, leaving us feeling as lyrically displaced and uncertain as the speaker.

Hardy is the author of, most recently, “Aurora Americana” (Princeton University Press). His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He teaches at Bates College.

Threshold with Fog

The way you appear in red rayon
from thick furs from the road
that isn’t a road but dirt

worn with wanderers stones never still.
The way you tell me I’m nowhere
or nowhere I should be.

Not now you say. Your red
fingernails filed to blades. I turn
away drive away escape

that forest for rivers.
Another was with me
near a river.

Our gaze skyward
as everything rippled.
We were

momentarily luminous.
I’m crossing a border
despite fog despite

desperation.
I’m afraid of who I am without.
I’m afraid of who I am here.

— Myronn Hardy

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Threshold with Fog,” copyright 2025 by Myronn Hardy, appears by permission of the author.