Christina Davis

The Primer
by Christina Davis

She said, I love you.

He said, Nothing.


(As if there were just one
of each word and the one
who used it, used it up).


In the history of language
the first obscenity was silence.


Christina Davis received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and her M.Phil. in Modernist Literature from the University of Oxford. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Jubilat, LIT, The May Anthologies (selected by Ted Hughes), New England Review, New Republic, Paris Review, and Provincetown Arts (selected by Susan Mitchell). She is the recipient of several residencies to Yaddo and MacDowell, as well as to the Valparaiso Foundation in Spain. Currently the Assistant Director of the NYU Creative Writing Program, she lives in the heart of Greenwich Village.