Tuesday poem #391 : Allyson Paty : We Like to Say What Is Happening

 

The finger for beheading

across your phone

Across the facts

one is supposed to reconcile

you take in text

and the day takes you in like a pool

Helicopter drags its shadow

a double surface through the streets

The upshot of a body

is  I   D I S P L A C E

The air itself

something other than indifferent

when I was walking making little circles with my fingers

to feel the space

out past the skin

 

Allyson Paty's poems can be found in BOMB, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, jubilat, Kenyon Review Online, The Literary Review, Tin House, the PEN Poetry Series, and elsewhere. She was a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry and a 2017-2018 participant in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace program. With Norah Maki, she is co-founding editor of Singing Saw Press. She is Associate Director of the Writing Program at NYU Gallatin, where she runs Confluence, a platform for student writing, art, and research, and she teaches with NYU's Prison Education Program. She's published three chapbooks, most recently, Five O'clock on the Shore (above/ground press, 2019).

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan