Two Poems
Zan de Parry
If Feathers Were Cigarettes

This week I reunited with a friend
We ordered the same food
Bread with a simple sauce
She brought me metal pansies
She said there’s a story in her family of a duck
Like all ducks this duck wore water
But didn’t like the wetness
But burned her feathers
Rather than omitting the river
The conversation was difficult to hold
And somehow very expensive
I see myself as this duck I said


Barn Door

You can buy pants with pockets
On the pants. I use these for trips
To pocket-sized places, like my historic homeland
I’ve long realized that keeping my phone in my pocket
Is cost-effective, like living in a barn
Crack open your phone and see
Two people wearing glasses having sex

I can’t wait to take you home and rob you
Break your chaste and taste it with masa
To get a piece of your galore
Show up out of the woods at like 1000 AM
Cook you a boiling plate within seven minutes
Add 25 dollars to a new savings account
Until I can afford you an old, beautiful bridge
from the book COLD DOGS / The Song Cave
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Have you heard the phrase "Every reader is a writer"? It simply isn't true. And to accept the responsibility for others is the work of a door.
 
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"50 Contemporary Poets on the Best Poems They Read in 2024"

Sara Eliza Johnson, author of Vapor, on “Art After War” by Oksana Maksymchuk, originally published in Cincinnati Review: "I am in love with the trajectory of linguistic transformation in this poem, the energetic tension it cultivates between violent destruction and creation, the surreal and associative dream-logic that eventually parts to say the heartbreaking truth of reality so simply: that 'lives are fragile & can get broken.'"

via LITERARY HUB
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Cover of Cynthia Cruz's book, Back to the Woods
What Sparks Poetry: Cynthia Cruz on Reading Prose

"With capitalism, this constructive destruction is perverted and, instead of constructivity arising from destruction, we have only pure destruction. Stanzas four through six speak to this destruction, capitalism’s contamination. In, for example, the lines, 'Damage/from the inside,' the contamination occurs through subject formation which means it happens internally, through the mind."
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