Poetry
Life Sentences
The short weekend began with longing
Like shoes lined up on the closet floor waiting to be filled
The search for beauty in an age of war
I’m gonna hustle out before the vibe in here gets any worse
Mobility, that flood, jammed against the ordinary wash of things
Welcome to my country
Whatever it was you were looking for has gone and transformed itself into something you haven’t yet discovered you want
The emperor penguin, that dream spouse
In passing the brackish river (there was nothing more formidable, less inviting, more austere, foreboding, at once self-contained and restive) we began to feel the smallness of things, the city even, our tiny lives
She addressed the crowd by turns sincerely and with thanks, with humility and gratitude, with anger and ennui, with poise amidst gridlock, with no little tint of shame
Would that my mostly companion were this red leather book in this red leather bag
What is a blade of grass compared to the inner workings of an inner city
Baby coupons, diet offers, free stuff crowd the vision
There are no trees here, or birds to fill them
Faith, faith everywhere, but never any good to tell
All’s he wants is a shave and a haircut
The deforestation of my memory has been as complete as it ever will be. I’m so much younger now
The yogurt had a lot to do with it
Days of small sorrows alongside mass market concerns and tulip shadows cloud the evening’s suggested protocol, dinner, dream sequence
Night was beginning, more miscellaneous than ever
And there you were, looking so flush-left, brief, and sequestered, your rainy visage clouded with concern
Some other mothers never bother with fathers
That transgressive point at which, the material exploited beyond practical application, meaning so ruptured as to suggest no quantifiable relation between symbol and referent, gesture looses from impulse and connotation hurls haphazard bits across the surface
This job is particularly suited to those with a passion for anonymity
Nothing depends on this
So many forlorn tendencies amongst banks and banks of forgotten triumphs
In gesticulating histrionically to his captive crowd, the speaker shed his former self and walked away a new man, part worshipped idol, part empty carapace
Sink fast if you want to get out of here
I envied them their exuberance
In that secular moment we ceased, quizzically, to worry the source of our revelations
And the house, malleable for all those years, rallying to all the spaces between us
Respect for the dead is futile. It no longer matters what I do about you
No spitting, drinking, radio playing, cursing, adulating, genuflecting, ratiocinating, pleading, exhibiting, soliciting, posting, demonstrating, habit forming
I’m stuck inside my jacket and it’s too soon to say when I’ll be able to get out
As with rain, so with memory, spills and spills
The tagine was spoiled and the guests called away, only the table, spread with blue china and rhododendron, silver rings for the scalloped linen napkins, its austerity unblemished, seemed to cling with desperate and naïve patience to the evening’s plans
One sentence washes the other
That paratrooper, identity
There had been moons. There had been oceans, other worlds of oceans
Our lipophobia begat our carbophobia
Mailbox is an oxymoron
Of all the things I’ve touched, this chasm is the most solid and complete
I ache for one fraction of the decadence we knew that summer
Your rhetoric is all over my head
No question the suckling pig was a mistake
As dignity and virtue no longer suffer the operation, book, or lipstick, speech becoming elegy to itself
As you will begin to understand in another century
It wasn’t the contessa so much as the contest
From one plated disaster to the next broken arrangement we headed by spleen and tail for a less bottom-dwelling community
I hadn’t meant to love this one
We forget not what doesn’t matter but what matters too much
The candor and cheap joy of that night of empty bottles under the bridge lasted all the way to the next summer, spanning our breakneck year
I love you the way I love the “double rhythm of creating and destroying”
The whole could never be said to contain the sum total of all the parts along the way, yet it is hard to say which is greater
Stet the ampersand
No dusk has spread so completely to the tips of every object within view, each wisp tinged with its indigo-grey light, the room receding and the faces coming more fully into focus with each passing
minute
As it is good to meet up with porridge at last
It’s nice to hear you smile
All the bright lights and passersby somehow attenuated the sting of our canned discovery
I used to be from around here
Contributor
Elizabeth FodaskiElizabeth Fodaski is the author of fracas (Krupskaya, 1999). She lives in Brooklyn, where she teaches English at Saint Ann's School.
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