You seem to understand the need to think things through all the while never getting up from the breakfast table. A plate of parmigiano-reggiano drizzled with honey—delish. The make-it-new-again poets wound up in the newspaper on the same page as murderers. My morning routine has flowering clovers and juggernauts in it and the ferns are shedding next to the fish plant that smells like death. The actual vanishing point is in everyone’s kitchen window. These backyard constraints, in the context of poetic speculation, are out of control. My neighbor’s private enterprise is behind those shrubs where green beans sprout onto my side of the fence. I swear Ed and Elizabeth can hear my wife and I argue about the process of elimination and the you’s and I’s and the mess in the yard. Once everyone is listening will you start the poem that suspends difference past the point of breakage? Yeah, the one where history doesn’t repeat. The whole world is waiting for a way to eliminate the outdated version. Hasn’t it always been time to re-make the world?
Nicole Santalucia
Nicole Santalucia is the author of The Book of Dirt (NYQ Books), Spoiled Meat (Headmistress Press), and Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press). She is a recipient of the Charlotte Mew Chapbook Prize and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Best American Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, The Rumpus, Diode Editions, TINGE Magazine, as well as other places. She teaches poetry at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.
