By: Mark Tardi
Half Sonnet
We only imagine secrets, the stunted windows, that evil is a kind of lapse or distance, a falling away perverting the order of courtesies the 2-in-1 rumor played on a ukulele in the mouth, a desert
Half Sonnet
–for Sarah Ruhl
My bed has lost its boundaries
and my head is probably
not long breaks
from the music.
A shoulder is not a person
but its disruption
takes down the foundation.
Mark Tardi is originally from Chicago. His publications include the books The Circus of Trust, Airport music, and Euclid Shudders. A former Fulbright scholar, he lives with his family in a village in central Poland and is on faculty at the University of Lodz. The “Half Sonnets” largely grew out of the fact that I joined the ranks of parenthood. I tend to think and write in interlocking serial sequences, which can be sustained for many months (or years), but my time and energies are quite truncated these days and that sort of intellectual and creative luxuriating are infeasible. Instead, details have become entire worlds: how the presence of another (tiny) person remaps our own bodies and boundaries and rhythms; or how the very real dangers of rumor and innuendo reminded me that it’s all but impossible to make ominous music on the ukulele.