Poem of the Day
Study of Children
By Asha Futterman
did you know
that you all work for me?
I asked them as a joke
did you know
that you all work for me?
I asked them as a joke
He’d scoop up cheeks, as sweet and sour
As rotting apricots
In Kolonaki’s glassy labyrinth,
At any corner I run into her
that the mundane might offer with its lines
what sighs beneath the surface, even there,
Still, some shadings of the face persist
a capsule of that day that she'd been glad
No single excess, nothing jerrybuilt
or squandered in a fit of thriftlessness
accounts for what we've ended with. Despite
When a man threw his fist into a wall next to my eye
I said that was love, that love was rage.
I was in the habit of loving anyone who laid a cold hand
When I was five, my grandfather took me to the tomb
of King Suro, lifted me over the stone fences
and watched me slide down the mound over
This is you as a boy.
Your back is to the camera.
You are standing above the beach
To spectate
is a verb
that does not
as if you were ever wide-eyed enough to believe in urban legends
as if these plot elements weren’t the stalest of clichés: the secret lab, the
anaerobic chamber, the gloved hand ex machina, the chemical-
infused fog