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.
Who could find words, even in free-running prose,
To describe the wounds I saw, in all their horror—
Telling it over as many times as you choose,
Foreskin. A default setting.
In a city where I once lived, for many years
an old man sat on his doorstep, in his hand
a brown facecloth, which he turned
over and over, smoothed out
It begins in the back of the head,
gathering force like the strangler’s
mop in Slam sweeping across the floor.
It is the tenderness you feel you know
You may have had the tenderness you miss.
Still in the mask you wear your tongue can go
Even in sleep your shadow watches, me
Your whisper rustles through the sleeping room
As though you moved in silks. Why keep on trying?
You stand in the first dumbness of the snow
As finely, the gauze drop in pantomime,
All detail fades upon your startled face
Theresa used to come over every day. I’d be standing by the kitchen window and hear her cowboy boots on the walk. Then she would stand outside the door—I knew—listening for a sound inside, scratching the door with a twig, or reaching up to the handle to pull on it, softly, so no one would hear.
You were twenty-eight this past week—all of you. One would think you'd be twenty-eight part by part-the way the sun rises over a landscape—instead of all at once.
Human bodies are different from one another
But their souls are all alike, filled with brilliant uses
Like airports.