Two Poems
Theodore Worozbyt’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Antioch Review, Best American Poetry, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, Mississippi Review 30 Year Anthology, New England Review, Po&sie, Poetry, Sentence, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and Quarterly West. He has published two books of poetry, The Dauber Wings (Dream Horse Press) and Letters of Transit (University of Massachusetts Press), the latter winning the 2008 Juniper Prize. A third full-length collection, Tuesday Marriage Death, is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press. Objectless Fragments appears in the inaugural issue of The Chapbook. His newest chapbook, The City of Leaving and Forgetting, is just out in Country Music.
Black Circus
A grey grape hangs from my spine. The phone is ringing steadily, insistently, with no intent of stopping. I snap the Chinese privets that loll into the meander of the path up the hill. A white bag hangs from a scrub pine, tied for someone. The maple leaves spread out trapped inside the paper cylinder of the lamp, some red, some green, that I click on. When I come to, I am lying in the grass, a white wolf licking my face, as when I lay in the grass and a black circus ran around my head, and my name was a disc that could fly through the air and return, singing something learning to learn itself. Its head stays inside me when I pick it. My hand comes around, dark with burst blood. I wish for two turtles and get them, covered with hieroglyphics of the sun.
Pane
Off then to clouds where roses shed violet petals on my sheets. The Contessa has fled with the Duke into the hills, hidden under hay in the ox-cart, their feet pulled in, their jewels in another jar. The brutes of Mussolini are coming, from two directions, unstopped today. The word spreads through the village like oil in the well. Quiet women have led the girls down the hundred steps of the hill, where they spread the laundry over the rosemary hedgerows to dry, as they have always done, but this time in the dark, as a way for the planes they hope for, to find them. A wind climbs up the hill, smelling like salt tastes; they climb back to punch down the proofing bread and start the day’s cooking. No one is hungry, but everyone eats.
Theodore Worozbyt’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Antioch Review, Best American Poetry, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, Mississippi Review 30 Year Anthology, New England Review, Po&sie, Poetry, Sentence, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and Quarterly West. He has published two books of poetry, The Dauber Wings (Dream Horse Press) and Letters of Transit (University of Massachusetts Press), the latter winning the 2008 Juniper Prize. A third full-length collection, Tuesday Marriage Death, is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press. Objectless Fragments appears in the inaugural issue of The Chapbook. His newest chapbook, The City of Leaving and Forgetting, is just out in Country Music.