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.
Ink
I am looking for a word from you.
I’ve combed the landscape of my body,
I’ve travelled its dark rivers.
It's the rhythm and small plosive bombs in the mouth,
on the lips of the whisperer (me) who would like
in the best of all possible worlds to rhyme
High above the congregation of the laminated waters,
muscular and clear, that deeply and to great
It’s hot in this red room,
inside the beating heart of the ritual, explosive
now with duress, bleeding its stress
You waited at the station entrance.
I was late. My hair had turned gray
but there you were, all the snow gone,
all the leaves blown, the leopard sun
having leapt across a life never lived.
My less erotic god condemned
my taste for girls less classical
than you, the kind that can’t resist
A yacht at night strung with lights on the black
tide rolls to the rhythm of a trio playing
"Waltz for Debbie." The Milky Way looks on
there was blue smoke beyond the house a field
at day’s end slow darkening
in the tall corn our children scurried
invisible in the maze voices absorbed
by evening’s onset their voices echo
To survive, Siberia, or to survive Siberia:
neither seems possible. So cold, so boundless,
so wild there are parts as yet unnamed.
The workman
in white crossing the street
carries the wood T-beam