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.
child sprung from
the two of us—showing
us our ideal, the way
A red hand on the horse’s flanks
One hundred-and-some years ago
In these same precincts
What was it?
Something became lodged in the machine.
That was it. Which inflection could not cure.
At first light there are voices.
On the landing we can see
the parts on their heads.
Through the wild herd of horses, the streets of night, I shall be rushing
Seeking a blossoming alder branch in a black springed sleigh.
For a bonnet of snow I shall be searching, for the endless mill-wheel noise.
I shall not see the famous Phédre
In the ancient theatre crowned with tiers,
Its gallery rising smoky, high,
Come celebrate, kinsmen, the twilight of freedom,
The darkening conscience, the great year obscured;
Into the boiling waters of nightfall
The shelves are ugly and next to them is a garbage chute leading God knows where. Entire pallet loads get dumped in there: 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, as boxes wind up on the charity van, back in the world. Some of it is shredded; some is crisp—laundered once, folded, never worn.
When hunting, an Inuit man makes an igloo a day. Some of them have ice windows.
Once a day he walks away from the snow house by the snow hill.
An Inuit elder who saw an airplane says, It was talked about for a long time. It was constantly talked about as something that looked like a loon that
Jealousy. Whispered weather reports.
The lure of the land so strong it prompts
gossip: we chatter like small birds
at the edge of the ocean gray, foaming.