A good hard slap to the middle of my head. Three blackbirds sing in a red cage, three last filaments of thought that will probably snap. Their chatter rouses the gold-painted saint cross-legged near my bed. Something larger’s visible edge. I hesitate to reach out; then it comes to me that it is mine as…
he pours whiskey on time making a home in sleep one wall is enough for his back yesterday’s paper makes for a ceiling life is postponed for now but the ghosts still roaming his past are always on time panting every moment is an open grave a window to be shut he quarrels with the…
I erased it from the blackboard. Chalk bits dust to floor. The alphabet trailed me out of school. I wrote it again, in bold. By afternoon, I’d ripped out the page and fed it to the ducks. Bits of paper from bills into the pool. I walked to where the dam collects the shore and…
Months after it has all come out, Annie will go on thinking about Baby R and Mondo and how it could just as easily have been her. And yet, somehow Annie had always been able to slip away, hardly aware that she was doing so. Today, she was walking into the locker room,…
So big deal, so you find it sort of sucks, the voice said. Fine. Go out to your regular life where they pay you for doing something. The poem’s okay in that pile of old papers. You’ll see how you’ll empty the day, be back and open the door. Keys, even useless ones, have a…
Winter 2008-09 Stephen Ackerman"s poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, Boulevard, Columbia Review, Mudfish, Partisan Review, Seneca Review and upstreet. He lives with his wife, Laurie, and their sons, Nick and Will, in Dutchess County, New York. "I Would Live a Day with You" is from his manuscript Late Life. Dick Allen"s new collection…
A giant poplar shades the summer square. Breakfast shift done, Reem smooths her kinky mass of auburn curls, walks outside, her leaf-print dress green shadow on post-millennial bright air. It’s almost noon. I smell of sweat. I smell despite bain-moussant and deodorant, crumpled and aging , while recognizant of luck , to be, today, perennial…
How do you know? —Hardy, The Year’s Awakening Finch at my feeder, how do you know in muddy March to turn the first gold feather? By the light’s small increase, by the lesser night, the cell’s disturbance cold winter sleep awake? You do not know, nor I, why jonquils burn nor blood in Palestine—unwitting feather,…
Parked on the rock of the kitchen floor that the landlady put in herself, stone by stone, uneven, smooth, buttery, I talked—I guess loudly (it was a party, and there was wine) with a woman the color of wheat, even her eyelashes, and she was worried, she was saying, about the execution coming that morning…
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