Shopping Cart
    items

      ←

      August 17, 2015The Poe Cottage, 1992Katherine Barrett Swett

      The country has abandoned it,
      but not the wild.
      Crackheads sit
      on ruined benches in the park,
      crows call from plane
      trees, pitbulls bark
      at children playing in the glass,
      the dirtied dream
      of bureaucrats
      who hoped once to commemorate
      local genius,
      not recreate
      the House of Usher, death, unrest,
      delirium.
      Our guide confessed,
      “I sleep in the house when I can.
      I have a room
      in Manhattan,
      but it’s quiet here and near Fordham
      where I’m in school.
      At four a.m.
      I even play my violin.
      No one complains.”
      We followed him,
      stooping as we came inside
      the dark, low walls
      where his child bride
      lay in a room three paces wide,
      only a coat and cat
      for warmth, and died.

      from #48 - Summer 2015

      Katherine Barrett Swett

      “I have lived in New York City for my entire life. I was born in the same hospital where my children were born and teach at the same school where I was a student. These facts make me that rare creature, a provincial New Yorker. I like to write about the intimate aspects of New York life, not about ambition or skyscrapers, but about caged animals, anonymous ailanthus trees, obscure museums. To someone like me, New York can seem as small, as intimate and as unexpected as a brief poem. How do you make sense of chaos? You divide it into lines, what the city fathers called a grid plan.”

      →

      Related