They might be wild roses
This poem was generated using the cut-up technique as part of a group exercise at a class I’m taking at The Grotto called Pushing The Boundaries: Experiments in Fiction and Poetry.
AK Krajewska
Whom Am I? (Part One of I, You, He: Who Are the People in These Poems?)
Is the “I” of the poem the same as the “I” of the poet? Well, it’s complicated. Sometimes. And then again, sometimes not. And sometimes both. Let me explain. In a fictional narrative written in prose, most readers quickly realize that “I” just means the author chose to write in the first person, and the narrator is just another character. In modern narratives, that’s also often a clue that we shouldn’t necessarily believe everything the narrator has to say. In non-fiction prose, like essays or memoirs, readers generally assume the “I” of the narrative voice is the same as the […]
Alchemy Practicum and Goat Visit
Goat, you were the only one among the three goats who pressed his head against the fence when Rachel and I came to you after picking crab apples and black walnuts. I returned to the paradise of childhood labors...
Residual Heat at the Decommissioned Synchrotron
We step over fading caution tape, a Geiger counter in your hand ticking the steady tick of background radiation. Up and down the textured metal stairs...
The Self is Continuously Formed from the Outside In
I have for years now observed that the person I am is determined by the place in which I am. To a distressing level, frankly. Certain ways of being seem inaccessible in some places, utterly. For example in the American suburbs, which is one of the places I least like the person I am, I can’t even access the sense of melancholy of longing for the wilderness I might feel in the city[…]
Fire Danger: High
But you burn, and I know it.
Adrienne Rich, “Orion”
As we wind up the Berkley hills, brown foam
peels off the dash of his hot Dodge Dart.
I crank down the windows for a sun-singed draft…
How the War Started
When Xerxes wrote again: “Deliver up your arms,” Leonidas wrote back: “Come and take them.”
Black eye. The left one. Stubble. Leather jacket and underneath
a black t-shirt with “Fuck You” printed in white. Buckled boots.
The Longfellow Bridge
The T runs down the heart of the bridge. The cars shake in the dim light left by the dregs of the day...
The Cursed Safeway and Other Grocery Stores of San Francisco
Big grocery stores give me bad feelings because of the illusion of choice. You see 10 kinds of instant mac and cheese but God help you if you want celeriac root. Like that’s some kind of weird vegetable. It’s in the Penguin book of Cordon Bleu cooking!
Airplanes Over the Bog
Bagno. The name means bog. The village may have been a bog before the drainage ditches gridded it into kolkhoz...