By: David Schwartz
Uncle
You have been
Idling in red light and
Urgency. You know you
Are late. Life is late
Nights, then friction
As the sun rises, scalds
The fury and distance
Of empty space(s),
And explodes too soon
No matter
When it explodes.
“This is the tumor,
Rock hard and bulging
From my stomach, that will
Kill me,” he says.
“Feel it,” he says. And
The next time I
See him, his nova
Eyes will be suspicious
And feral, and will not
Relay my features
To his brain in familiar data
Nor will they attach
Love to this parting
Glance.
The Familiar Stranger
I have seen you
Twice today, and not at all
With valid senses. Of the bodies
I have seen, not one is yours,
Much less mine.
Not one throat
has opened with
Force enough to launch
A syllable. And I
Wonder if I know this woman
Less for calling
Her by your name.
Skeleton Tree
The valleyed eyes and careworn mouth of
A skeleton tree
On which the fingers hang
Like leaves—like bones
Below the skin of a chest
Too shrunk at the seams to
Breathe. He moans,
Hoping to expel the desert, which like sand in
An oyster grinds
And agitates without end but
Unlike an oyster, forms nothing—
Were pearls ever worked for?
All things are
Stolen—by or from.
David Schwartz is an emerging writer from Northeast Ohio whose work typically focuses on myth, folklore, and biblical storytelling. He holds a B.A. in English from Baldwin Wallace University. His work has been published in journals including The Mill, The Underground, and Fiction War Magazine.
"My poem, "Uncle," was drafted one morning after I arrived late to work. This was only a few weeks after my uncle's stomach cancer had killed him. And I felt that my hectic, angry commute could be compared to the hurried life that my wealthy, bachelor uncle had lead before his death. Then, seeing this, I began to consider life as a limited action bookended and compressed by mortality. So, as I revised this poem, I tried to explore the relationship between achievement and death-- between ambition and docility. Ultimately, I wanted to capture a sense of strain-- like some violent, productive chemical reaction. I like to say that "Familiar Stranger" (We Are Familiar Strangers) is a piece that I wrote accidentally. One afternoon, while trying to work on a short story in the atrium of the Cleveland Museum of Art (my favorite writing spot), I found myself missing a former romantic partner. And, of course, everyone began to look like her after loneliness took root. So I took a break from my story, bought a glass of whiskey, and wrote the first draft of this poem. I wrote "Skeleton Tree" a few months after finishing my undergraduate degree. For me, this period of time was disorienting and painful. It resulted in a months-long depressive episode that entailed plenty of writer's block and a shortage of artistic productivity. One of the few pieces that came out of it, though, was "Skeleton Tree:" a poem about broken structure, decay, and the frantic search for relief-- for catharsis or answers of any kind from any source."
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