Claire Sylvester Smith has recent work appearing or forthcoming in Boston Review, Colorado Review, American Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and Barn Owl Review, and is currently the poetry editor at Bat City Review. She lives in Austin, Texas. Personal Statement Claire Sylvester Smith The first goal: to make something perfect that no one notices is. The second has to do with need in its least quantifiable means. Lists have three things: the way scale is abstracted and in tension with size in the hypnagogic state. A darkling mechanical sense lives within me, and asks to see the ceilings of my church. One of my issues with existence is that hamburgers are delicious. One of my issues is the name of being handsome with love. I didn’t like being childish when I was one, and that at least has not changed. Living by rote of a grid, I am sorry to combat the kind of longing ancillary to a man on a ladder with a stick who is changing the marquee. Thus march on the lunar loomings. Thus rests the hammer in its loop. A goal is when I want to look like I’m holding a box but not be. An animal’s only exciting if I can tell it doesn’t want to be seen. When I lived in a rainy town we persisted, making oaken boats of sleep and complaining. I had a goal then to live in the desert, to make a boat so large I could forget I was afloat.