Tuesday poem #583 : Beatrice Szymkowiak : The Crossing

 

 

Your buttterfly headdress stills, our bodies
lie on the asphalt, hunger

for bulge or crevices, roots,
a scutter of hooves across chests.

So does the carnival end, its unrequited life
lingering in the marrow

like a swallow after dark. You sigh

night & satellites swarm around lampposts.
The moon drops,

stirs an empty parking lot, a wolf’s howl
mangles into an oil puddle.

 

 

 

Beatrice Szymkowiak is a French-American writer and scholar. She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and a PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Red Zone (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a poetry chapbook, as well as the winner of the 2017 OmniDawn Single Poem Broadside Contest, and the recipient of the 2022 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry for her full-length collection B/RDS, published by the University of Utah Press in 2023. Her work also has appeared in numerous poetry magazines. 

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

 

Tuesday poem #582 : Ian Seed : Fired

 

There was one poem left to workshop when the last session

I was ever going to teach at the university came to the end

of its allotted time,

 

so I said we could add an extra quarter of an hour

for the poem, but then found myself for the first time in years

dying for a cigarette.

 

Even if smoking was of course forbidden in the seminar rooms,

I asked one of the students to ask Stella in the office if she

would offer me one of her cigarettes.

 

A couple of minutes later the students watched incredulously

as I lit up (with a match from the box Stella had lent me)

and puffed away – like a poet from the 1970s,

 

it occurred to me, as I began asking questions about

the poem to get the students talking

instead of staring.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ian Seed's [Photo by Jonathan Bean for Lancaster litfest] recent collections of poetry and prose poetry include Night Window (Shearsman, 2024), Operations of Water (Knives, Forks & Spoons Press, 2020), and New York Hotel (Shearsman, 2018) (a TLS Book of the Year). His most recent translations are The Dice Cup, from the French of Max Jacob (Wakefield Press, 2022), and the river which sleep has told me, from the Italian of Ivano Fermini (Fortnightly Review Odd Volumes, 2022). See www.ianseed.co.uk

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan