Poem of the Day
Study of Children
By Asha Futterman
did you know
that you all work for me?
I asked them as a joke
did you know
that you all work for me?
I asked them as a joke
I take her, painless, through the glass.
Her dress tears off. I covet that.
The glass is beautiful, sharp and steep—
Keith, at the time, was living in an old warehouse just across the freeway from downtown, right at the exit ramp. There was a long asphalt driveway that ran up to the huge double door that was his front door, and there was one exactly like it across the warehouse; the same kind of door and driveway leading out and down to the street again.
Driving look out the window at where / The mail box used to be
I get anxious / for the speed
old men of a more genteel nature / play bridge or something similar.
Once in the middle of a boy’s walk
Where I came seeking facts to wonder at,
I found a relic left from a small life,
Mother of fictions
and of irony,
help us to laugh.
I, Gelimer, on a hill in Africa,
Recently come to my senses, although it is late.
At the end of my kingdom and my years,
Not that his writing isn’t moving when
it doesn’t seem it should be,
owing in part, at least, to the cloud of difficulty
He begins to notice how all his single friends have dogs
And wear expensive running shoes, how their conversations run
To deep metaphysical questions that didn’t exist before 1983.