"Traveling," by Malena Mörling

• Like streetlights
• still lit
• past dawn,
• the dead
• stare at us
• from the framed
• photographs.

• You may say otherwise,
• but there they are,
• still here
• traveling
• continuously
• backwards
• without a sound
• further and further
• into the past.

Malena Mörling was born in Stockholm and grew up in southern Sweden. She is the author of two collections of poetry (Ocean Avenue and Astoria), has translated several Swedish poets, and is currently editing an anthology titled Swedish Writers on Writing. She is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, a member of the faculty in the low-residency MFA program at New England College, and a research associate at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 and a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship in 2010. “Traveling” is from Astoria, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, and is reprinted by permission. Author’s photograph by Bill Brady.