Genevieve Burger-Weiser

Bloodwork Some guy, bleeding, just beaten by hooded strangers on the late train, asks some girl, Miss S, a witness, the same question that lovers ask each other turning from mirrors, away, “How do I look?” & she, bystanding, replies “Frankly, you’re in a bad way.” She’d been thinking of the one, long gone, who got away, the one who’d taken himself from her & those days when she’d turn, adoring, to him. Amazing. (That’s what he used to say.) Thus S, on loss, ruminates. You can see what she’s getting at, can see where she’s heading. Your eyes have got that same telling ache & sanguine reverie. You too have once walked in twos, linked to another in the light rain…. But we all, now & then, walk alone, especially in the city of men, where most you meet are bled dry & broken, or have cashed in care [...]

A selection from Upriver It was a struggle switching over to a citrus flavored toothpaste, but Roosevelt loved her. The more nights he spent at Linda’s place, the less sense it made to keep brushing with just water. She never offered outright, but he used her toothbrush that already tasted mostly like oranges anyway. “We are not a regular couple,” she would say. “We have a structure.” This was true. They followed a very precise schedule. But Roosevelt’s nose was sensitive. He thought about toothpaste when they kissed at night and he should’ve been thinking about her. _____________________________________________________________ Sara Slaughter lives in New Orleans and is currently enrolled in the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The Honeyland Review, Method, and a collection celebrating what would have been the 100th birthday of Elizabeth Bishop. Related Posts Poem(s) of the Week: M.A. Vizsolyi [...]

Dead reckoning Late in the day and the sky is still white. When I look across the river I see another city. Even the sun is still so white. Yesterday I went walking with my hands in front of me and my lungs inside me I know I did. See, nothing has changed between us and the selves that arrived here. Sometimes the moon still appears, after a struggle. Other times it is obscured, is absent. The moon, beyond which are stars. People following them from another latitude. Yesterday I went walking and in front of me were hands. _______________________________________ Adam Tessier lives in Cambridge, where he manages a coffee shop. He has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Memorious, Linebreak, Remedy Quarterly, Anti-, and elsewhere. Related Posts Poem of the Week: Joseph Fasano The Melody Ascends Stepwise February 15, 2010 [...]

Sudden Hymn in Autumn I remember a woman handing me fruit through my illness. I remember her hands were thin: two gazelles lost in a field of clove. Every time I came back, I heard insects splitting their cores for slender wings. I remember a woman they hanged from the barn’s rafters, her nightgown blowing toward the pond. Some boys had wrestled a buck to the ground, covered him in gasoline. In the morning someone came with a knot of black antlers: what he’d found ten feet high in a poplar tree. I remember October hunched like a colt in a suit of black leaves. I remember hearing him breach the room, how his heavy tack dragged on the floor, how I lifted an arm in trust of his body. _______________________________________ Joseph Fasano was born and raised in New York’s Hudson River Valley. His poems have appeared in Tin House, [...]

Oranges and Snow is a selection of Milan Djordjevic’s poems, translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic and published by Princeton University Press as part of the Facing Pages series. I was grateful to Simic’s pithy yet thorough introduction to Djordjevic as a writer and, just as importantly, as a person. Simic explains that Djordjevic grew up under a restrictive Communist government, saw his homeland ravaged by ethnic warfare, wrote for publications that opposed Slobodan Milosevic’s regime, and in 2007 sustained a personal tragedy that has confined him to his house—he was hit by a car while walking in a designated crosswalk in Belgrade. If Simic assesses that “The poet’s mission is not to save the world, but to save some human experience from oblivion,” I see Simic’s translation of Djordjevic’s work as an accomplishment of a similar gesture. Djordjevic’s house-bound eye and voice accentuate how much of a gift [...]

“Not freed / but caught up in what thinking tries to conceal:” that is what spending time with Timothy Donnelly’s poetry feels like, “where to know / is to feel knowledge dissolving. . .” (“Chapter For Breathing Air Among the Waters”). Essentially metaphysical, the poems of , are fueled and refueled by self-critical dueling, a curiosity about being, and a skepticism of being’s significance. The speaker’s craft is self-referential but never heavy-handed. The book is also driven by an inexhaustible love for language; many of these poems are expertly wrought love letters to language itself. It is particularly refreshing to encounter Donnelly’s poems amid the ongoing financial spiral, with politicians posturing at troubleshooting and the generally frustrating vapidity (not to mention downright falseness) flying around like debris in the wind. Though these poems are not overtly political, there is an undercurrent of social and political commentary. Donnelly observes, “the mind [...]

new book of poetry, , is a metaphysical meditation on identity through time and the search for the real amidst ghosts, memories, and illusory images. As in the artful illusions of theatre and movies, to which Klein alludes frequently, lighting can change everything in these poems—here people darken or there is an overwhelming bomb-blast of sunlight. Love and loss seem to be the fundamental elements from which these poems originate. Klein leaves little, if anything, out of his depictions of the essential facets of a certain kind of writer’s life, the trials of a childhood filled with shame and pain, its fair share of neglect, and the realization, even if only for one ghastly instant, that your parents wished you were different from what you are. There is endless questioning of reality and identity; there is the friend with whom you committed the requisite mistake of sex; there is more [...]