RICHARD KENNEY
Civics
Sub-rosa cues on raceā / the gutter-tongue that plays / to an ever-baser baseā / what’s so hard to see?
Sub-rosa cues on raceā / the gutter-tongue that plays / to an ever-baser baseā / what’s so hard to see?
Though my appetite is small, I will prepare a feast.
My mind / Is like the harp strings, with a breeze blowing always / And no rest in sight.
That the belts move / among grease
Poetry Northwestās podcast series, The Subvocal Zoo, features editors and friends of the magazine interviewing poets. Each episode features lively conversation between writers in a different location.
As I lowered the match / I thought how loss is assured
Of course there is another world. But it is not elsewhere.
A little later she and I are alone in the room, / nearly ourselves again, together gathering the meager fruits / and meditating on the empty party
I have nothing to say. I am a recording machine, / a listening device.
I wrote āConfessionā in the winter, recently after I had moved from Iowa City to Cambridge, MA. Iād moved from a rambling attic apartment with secret unfinished rooms to a partially furnished attic studio with a shared bathroom down the hall. My writing space was the floor. The convent of San Marco in Florence, Italy contains small, individual cells, like a beehive, that monks would use for devotion. Each cell is bare save for a simple fresco by the early Renaissance master Fra Angelico. My room in Cambridge hardly had a monastic aesthetic; books and clothes were piled in geological strata. Every so often, I would find a bee feebly circling around the lampshade, or a couple of dead bees in the windowsill. āConfessionā came to me after receiving a phone call very early in the morning from a friend whom I hadnāt spoken with in months. I donāt know why she chose that morning. She was in a difficult relationship, unhappy, isolated, yet surrounded by a city; I was feeling adrift and lonely, uncertain …