Want by Rusty Morrison

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend March 16, 2015   Want   Rusty Morrison

crowded Monday subway its       mindlessness botanical      you take the first seat claim it        for your age your figural        effaced your t-shirt smelling        already like somebody   else’s sweat a toddler is       crashing against your leg his      mom gives him a sucker he       hasn’t figured out how to      fit inside his mouth you taste      the instant’s sumptuous pause   between confused and choking      on surfaces you can’t fit       your lips around and swallow       incentivizing short terms       that electronically       spit you out your genes passed on   without you in the pool you      didn’t know how soon would drown      you            Copyright © 2015 by Rusty Morrison. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “I started working in a tightly constrained form because I wanted to write about a desire to escape limits. But I didn’t want to just write about frustrating limitation, I wanted to live inside limitation in the work and then see how I handled it. I wanted event, not aftermath. Ann Lauterbach points out that the ‘convergence of subject matter with form releases content.’ I’m finding that this form (seven-syllable segments paired in tercets, no punctuation) creates a contentiousness in my use of syntax that forces me to diverge from my more expected trajectories of thought, and thus exposes a content with more contextual resources than I’d had access to.” —Rusty Morrison   Rusty Morrison is the author of Beyond The Chainlink (Ahsahta Press, 2014). She is the copublisher of Omnidawn Publishing and lives in Richmond, California. Most Recent Book by Morrison   Beyond The Chainlink (Ahsahta Press, 2014) "Wood's Edge" by Brenda Hillman "Unfollowed Figment" by Lyn Hejinian "In a Station of the Metro" by Ezra Pound Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038