No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. No Kings.
Nestled on either side of a busy six-lane highway, a neglected cemetery quietly ages. Separated from the road by a sagging chain link fence topped with rusting barbed wire, the majority of travelers, going well over the posted speed limit, pay the relic no mind.
Her parents are professors at Brooklyn Law. I forget their names: Shel and Sarah or Saul and Sally. We haven’t said more than five words to each other, but I’ve watched their girl, Juliet, grow from a chirpy, sunny blonde to a pale, quiet teenager. She hides behind her long, straight, dishwater hair, with just the cuff of her silver-tipped earring poking out.
I thought epistolary poems were great
until I started to write one.
The paper I wanted to write on
screamed at me and I lunged back in fear.
The river warden stood submerged up to his waist in the mid-stream, where the braiding sinews of a syrupy undercurrent had relaxed to create a skewed ellipse of near-motionless water. After many years on the river he found that he could easily spot these dead zones within the slowly-circulating continuity that eased itself interminably between the banks.
The American Beat writers circled back into fashion in the UK during the late 1980s / early 1990s. Their resurgence coincided with a spike in the counterculture that was perhaps a reaction to the grind of over a decade of conservative leadership and Thatcher-ism.
I remember lovely sunny October day: last year of medical school. Field trip to the leper colony 100 km outside of Moscow, town of Zagorsk. That is how lepers live: small apartments in one-story barracks, thick cabbage soup, cabbage from the nearby village, thick smell of the slow-smoldering life as you enter the porch of the dwelling.