Be sure to check out three new pieces on KRO: Colin Cheney’s “Ars Poetica with Vulture,” Catie Rosemurgy’s “New York, New York, New York, New York, New York” and Zach Savich’s review of X.J. Kennedy’s In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955 – 2007.
There are a host of reasons to get on over to KRO, but try this one on: an excerpt from Cheney’s “Ars Poetica with Vulture.”
“The ways I can make you believe in the relation of things:
this is like, so, and, which reminds me of. Sometimes I wish
I didn’t need to explain it to you like this. But remember
how she had that snapshot of blue sky & said there,those are the birds, there, & how that felt to not see them
& still believe her? Like when the birds
in your poems came to eat all of those in mine,or how the peregrine culled our swallows as they swarmed
from our barn as their kin did from the church in Krakow
that evening we returned from Birkenau where you’d founda birdhouse above the barracks & the lioness poet
told us that swallows migrate through Africa & she’d never
hear the word ringdove the same after what we’d seen.”