Tom Snarsky is a special education math teacher at Malden High School in Malden, Massachusetts, USA. He is the author of Threshold, a chapbook of poems available from Another New Calligraphy. He lives in Chelsea, MA with his wife Kristi and their two cats, Niles and Daphne.
***
1 Untitled
Room for one tired, princely idea
to fold its wings, to participate
fully in free-market sleep like the
rings of rain around umbrella stands.
***
2 Poem without the letter “e” (starting
right now)
It’s changing how I build my small raft
and float on it through living. It’s living
in our world as a bird, as though you
hadn’t thought of that.
It’s a book shut
loudly upon finishing its last word, or
music that stops without any warning.
I’d call it what it is, but for now I must
call it duration,
a fun mind trick to blur
our days into unity. Of all birds I know
your down is most, uh, fitting, or do I
want to say warm.
I don’t know which,
and actually I don’t know if I think
it’s important to pick. I’m just thinking
until my small raft finally starts to sink.
***
3 Hammered Beautiful
Anytime I feel deeply
unsure, I return to a beach
surest place there is
Sorry. The trash collects
little pieces of being for
-given, which is easy
or easier than you’d think
to mistype as “fuck”
at least in the middle there
***
4 Survival by Danielle Collobert, translated (or not) by Norma Cole
Late Prynne helped, but only a little
I leaving voice without
response
Like a rock in the belly of Montaigne
to articulate sometimes the
words
A valve to shut the river water off
that silence response to
other ear never
Death and deafness nothing common
if to muteness the world not
a noise
Rapt in shared stillborn depress
sinks into the cosmos blue
Show me your arrow outward
no longer question that
vertical trip
I say goodbye to the midnight forest
I leaving slide to the
horizon
Start with our common lava and then
all equal all mortal from the
I on
überschwemmt / Den stillen horizont
at full speed fleeing the
horizon
The same Jackson C. Frank song
at last to hear only music in
the cries
“I Want To Be Alone (Dialogue)” or
enough enough
“October”
exit
When I sing the same song over and over
to enter born on garbage
hardly recognized the ground
Eine blasse Wäscherin / Wäscht zur Nachtzeit
emerged from salty slime the
fetus come out of the drain
bleiche Tücher
solar plexus eaten away
anguish diffusing lungs breath gasping
/
Silhouette the way the flowers wilt
squeezed the neck by the cord
waking
Incidental throttled history red
trembling waking
Coming up here
burnt consumed bonze
Coming down with language
body break
“If I could just leave
out of touch caresses
My body for the night”
far from lips drank
Idea on the half-swell
memory of the body
And falcons
letting go present the
instant survival
Where is my mother
without knowing on what to
open
What happened to my family
the energy to the imaginary
answered
The waking up and needing to scream
stutterings hardly at the
rips
Smell of burnt olives
the cries from the edges of
wounds not enough
Imagine every day felt like this
dove black into the bloodbath
A black burn glove torn off a scarred hand
to be worked the veins for
words
It’s my mother, her song
I speech to open mouth open
to say I see to whom
The clean and unstrange blade
swung to chaos weaponless
Fletching bright arrow forward into sun
will survive or not
resistance to blows
Hammered beautiful
the long lasting life
***
5 The Lilac System
Do you know this song?
How the golden light at night
comes through the window
with no explanation,
not a wide enough view
to understand what must be
reflecting to cause that
glow on the water, like is it
skyline or streetlight?
How is it so consistent?
