Poem of the Day
Consecutive Preterite
By Jessica Laser
That summer I learned Biblical Hebrew / with Christian women heaving themselves / toward ministry one brick building at a time.
That summer I learned Biblical Hebrew / with Christian women heaving themselves / toward ministry one brick building at a time.
I was on top, pressed into the scent
you left at night on the shabby
bed. We were both on add and you said
Take this pic—take this
newly minted plaque.
For plaque, read empire. Say—puff puff
pass. Say—Baba, please. Zip up. You and your dirty
One hundred and eighty-two pages spreads her story like disease.
They send me one false daughter—Dracula—
and then carefully erase the scene.
She’s been erected out of thin air—with the thin air of money.
In Konya—I scream—in Ulus—I embrace her—
while these papers spread her story like disease.
I murdered my least defensible vices,
stacking them like bodies
in the surf.
A ribbon around an oak tree reads
brother. The oak’s roots
sinking deeper into the dirt.
A heart
Mother fingers in the mud. Mother begging bowl.
The just man followed then his angel guide
Where he strode on the black highway, hulking and bright;
But a wild grief in his wife’s bosom cried,
All is despoiled, abandoned, sold;
Death’s wing has swept the sky of color;
All’s eaten by a hungry dolor.
Atop
The lily stems
A handiwork of Spring
The lily castles
I was sent to my room to think things over
So I sat with white dog
On a ledge