Tuesday poem #273 : Janet Kaplan : Good Living

who are born ice

The living and working rooms must be well ventilated. A window in the bedroom should be opened a foot both at the top and bottom in winter, twice as much when the weather is not cold.  Good food Business solutions About our ads

air melting them like thoughts

leaking space

& leaky time

The older boys shove her and the boy she likes between the vestibule door and wall—a Bronx side-street, late afternoon, 1965. They make them kiss, say they’ll pull her shorts down if she doesn’t. I have asthma, says the little boy, red-faced and wheezing. Later she goes upstairs: shame’s home and invisibility. Its permanence.

           

Light, she sees—

it licks

the bright yolk

the mind

the drip

To live now: aware of permanence and its access to irony. Take plastic, waste it into an ocean—light breaks it to its molecular soul. Invisible, it enters the plastic body.

Exercise, especially such as calls into action the chest muscles and fills the lungs with air Some results have been removed Richmond Air Show “Watch, now he’s getting ready!” There he goes! Gee whiz! Wasn’t that swell?”

Alvin Davidson, The Human Body and Health, Revised

American Book Company, 1909

Woolner Calisch, “Richmond Air Show of 1909”

Richmond-Times Dispatch, 1939

Janet Kaplan’s [photo credit: Silvia Sanza] full-length poetry books are Ecotones (forthcoming from Eyewear Ltd. in 2019), Dreamlife of a Philanthropist: Prose Poems & Prose Sonnets (winner of the 2011 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry from University of Notre Dame Press), The Glazier’s Country (winner of the 2003 Poets Out Loud Prize from Fordham University Press) and The Groundnote (Alice James Books, 1998). Her honors include grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Bronx Council on the Arts, fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ucross Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center. Her poems have appeared in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Cross Currents, Denver Quarterly, Interim, The Paris Review, Pool, The Prose Poem Project, Sentence, The Southampton Review, Tupelo Quarterly and many others, as well as in the anthologies An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions, 2007) and Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James (Alice James Books, 2012). She’s served as Poet-in-Residence at Fordham University and is currently a member of the creative writing faculty at Hofstra University, where she edits the digital literary magazine AMP.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan