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.
Your glassy wind breaks on a shoutless shore and stirs around
the rose.
I was born in the circus. I play the flat man.
My voice is flat, my walk is flat, my ironies
move flatly out to sock you in the eye.
All day I measure noses.
People are brought before me.
My brass calipers never lie.
My father? He was into shoes.
But also into pins and needles,
pots and pans: a five-and-ten,
Each has a foot-square paper napkin stuck
to the headrest: a bow to budget travelers' sensibilities.
Too bad each square evokes a paper toilet seat:
It's not as simple as rhyming “mud” and “blood”
as Owen did and does (“I, too, saw God through mud”)
in his “Apologia.”
I walk along the shore.
Wind's salt tongue licks my face.
And see—beyond the swells
Sublimation, a new version of piety.
Hovers the paint and gets her going.
Everything drifts, a barely heard sigh is the
You hire a guide. See several waterfalls,
a dock for a boat, and, indeed, a boat.
You rock to a shore where bats rise as gulls.