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.
People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself. Why is this young man flirting with this old man?
The season's first few leaves fall.
A zoo is loosed in the grass.
Corridors of the city
End in a deer’s eye.
The deer stumbles among legs
In my home we take turns with the remote
and whoever's turn it is calls the show.
Winter antelopes into erstwhile
dogmas committed against an ivory
cane, and three ducats of pilsner
Reader unmov'd and Reader unshaken. Reader unsedc'd
and unterrified, through the long-loud and the sweet-still
I creep toward you. Toward you, I thistle and I climb.
What does it mean? I lie awake;
My mind needs rest, my bones all ache:
So needy and so loath to take?
I escaped, spinning off
to heaven knows what
location, eluding
I see now I was 50 percent to blame.
That’s right. And, because I value fairness,
I’ll apologize for leaving you
alone with my dad that time we sprang him from Bellevue
Weary am I now love
now that I’m weary of love
On a park bench after dark,
practically begging
to be assaulted, I—Wolf,
you bit my hand off.