In 2005, I was living in a tiny studio apartment in Boston, crammed full of furniture and books and papers, without much wall space for decoration. When I came across “There Are Two Worlds” by Larry Levis, I was moved by it. I’m from the bluegrass region of Kentucky, horse country, on the Ohio River, and grew up surrounded by horses grazing on the rolling hills.

This poem, with its southernness and imagery of jockeys and holiness and the river, resonated with me very deeply. I’ve always liked text as decoration, and look for ways to bring poetry more into the space of my life, to make it part of the furniture. So I took advantage of the blank white space on the front of the fridge, almost the only blank space in my apartment, to write the poem in dry erase marker.

It stayed there until I moved out, a year and a half later; so long that it took hours of scrubbing to get the words off again.

—Anne Browder  

Anne Browder is a PhD candidate in Assyriology at Harvard University.