Poetry
Three
Dear Diary
I am waiting for a goat to chew carnations
at my window. A million stars go dark
in walls like men I have kissed at the right
time for the wrong reasons. But this is not
about numbers or how my steps sink
in a quicksand of longing. This is about
weird word pairings—lichen and fang—
soaring like wrens for erasure in Heaven.
I return, indent, and try to name
ten living painters whose palettes run
the gamut of blues. Zebra, rucksack, valley,
fingers. Where is my hymnal, my bellweather
song? Bleating, you arrive like flowers.
Tapestry
The moon is a feather. The hour smoke.
Green like a river the mountain is red.
A mule descends a yellow thread.
It carries on its back a door
on which is carved a hall of doors.
Penitents, paramours, chapel of bone—
who will remember the names of birds?
In the heart of this desert
no horse, no spear
a horseman spears a nation of water.
Two Cadae from The Burning Door
If I could
I
would live in it—
this
crudely-built bird house
of scarred worm wood balanced just beyond
the reach
of my extended arm—
or at least visit
once or twice
to confirm what I
have no firm basis to believe:
the floors are lined with soft white feathers
the walls painted sixteen greens.
A keepsake:
nine
hand-printed words
on
a scrap of yellow
legal paper each word two spaces
beneath
the one that comes before
it and six of those
with a line
crossed through like a road.
But what about the other three?
Cardio, candles, fertilizer—
these are the words of the dead.
Contributor
Tony LeuzziTony Leuzzi is the author of Radiant Losses (New Sins Press, 2010) and The Burning Door (Tiger Bark Press 2014). In 2010, BOA Editions released Passwords Primeval, Leuzzi's interviews with 20 American Poets.
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ALBERT MOBILIO with Tony Leuzzi
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Albert Mobilio is a poet and critic whose poems exhibit a highly critical intelligence. On the other hand, as demonstrated in the following discussion, his critical acumen can be as aesthetically rewarding as his poems. Each role informs the other.

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With Hold Me Tight, the poets newest collection, Schneiderman does not rest on his laurels or try to repeat the formula of his former books. As he admits below, each of his projects is markedly different from the one that precedes it. This acknowledgement demonstrates the poets searching intelligence as he finds new ways to mine persistent obsessions.
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Broadly speaking, the central theme of Cardinal is traveling while black in America; but like individual stars in a cluster orbiting some galactic center, each of Dayes poems emits its own light: any single moment of illumination is as crucial as the panoramic view.
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“I want language to approximate the kind of conversation one might have some evening, talking about real things, serious things, but not feeling especially dire, and the talking is happening just as ones thinking about it, so that the thought and the expression of the thought are happening simultaneously.”