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
And when I dream of her movies
My life is beautiful
It is her, your sister, she said. Brother and sister cried. What is she doing on radio? Yes, brother cried, it is her, I know.
It is eighty years I listen to fortune teller
Say that reunions with lost ones
approach.
When we showed up for the reading drunk, John,
We were in celestial form, unmixed
Really, mothers, have you been listening? You have forgotten your spectacles and your hearing aids are beeping but you cannot hear them.
No one is willing to suggest
it’s miraculous: the blood-like strain
weeping from the third of several
You must be dead at least ten years.
You must have lived an unremarkable life
before that: a teacher, say, of unremarkable
For the sake of argument pretend
we don't know who they are, this couple,
one on either side of a cast-iron tree
I’d just then turned away
from recording all the charge slips I’d laid
aside during morning rush—gas sales,
Not the kiss alone
but an essence of kiss,
its dark matter left undisclosed