Is It Better Where You Are? by Christopher Salerno

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend June 2, 2015   Is It Better Where You Are?   Christopher Salerno

The bakery’s graffiti either spells HOPE or NOPE. But hope and results are different, said Fannie Braun to her Keats voiding his unreasonable lung. Getting off the medicine completely means light again blinking to light. Device returned to its factory settings. The complete black of before the meteor shower above the bakery. If you lose the smell of leather, lemon, or rose, studies show you will fail at being, like Keats. I keep watching the same meteor shower videos on YouTube where awe is always a question of scale. Night can be moths or weather, pulled in the dark. The bakery, now, is beginning to close. My arrhythmic heart aches for the kind of dramatic arc one can’t shop for. Or else to lease what’s real for a while— is this the good kind of consumption? I wonder over the weight of meaning. The difference between hull and seed. The sugary donut and its graceful hole. The greasy bags that everyone leaves in the alley leading to my door. These scraps I work at like a crow.            Copyright © 2015 by Christopher Salerno. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “Last winter while out for a walk I noticed in the alley behind the bakery at the end of my street some indecipherable graffiti. It was enough to get me geared up, since I couldn’t decipher whether it read ‘hope’ or, possibly, ‘nope.’ That, and I am super driven by sweet treats and so I’m always visiting that bakery. From there, with Keats and meteors and bouts of puzzlement, this poem just sort of wandered in.” —Christopher Salerno   Christopher Salerno is the author of ATM (Georgetown Review Press, 2014). He teaches at William Paterson University and lives in Caldwell, New Jersey. Most Recent Book by Salerno   ATM  (Georgetown Review Press, 2014) "The Needle" by Jennifer Grotz "Bread and Cake" by Kevin Prufer "Panels for the Walls" by Cedar Sigo Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.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