Andrew Kozma received an M.F.A. from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He was born in Tucson, Arizona, but only lived there nine months, so your guess is as good as his as to where he’s from. His poems have been published in […]
The blackbird flew down my throat and took my tongue with it. Feathers the light brown of a ripe banana and, like a banana, at least two. Of the dozens of people on this patio each day, it chose me, my dappled skin. Cognoscenti the Great, you might have heard? who wowed them in Innsbruck. […]
Every day in every way I am getting better and better. I am not a waffler. Syrup and butter slide off me. Unedged, whole, my face is what it is. Do not be deceived: neither am I a pancake. Every day in every way I am getting butter and butter. You can hold my voice […]
Everything seems closer from far away. Your face a name on an envelope. Here is your hair in ink, a cathedral. Do you trust me? You can always remove the keystone. A summer scarf looking for a wheel. The hair on my sheets wrapped tight round my fingers. Slipped in my mouth a nipple resistant […]
In 1923, in Vyatka Prison, the SR Struzhinsky and his comrades (how many were there? who were they? what were they protesting against?) barricaded themselves in a cell, poured kerosene over all the mattresses and incinerated themselves. ~Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago When the second hand stops, a sudden rainstorm pauses, holds itself like […]
My father said I would not find him here, but I’ve 2 coins for passage, 3 boiled ox bones, 1 cup blood. Hell is a room the size of the world: I’ve been two days on the Plain of Needles, each one sewing some poor soul to the landscape. The souls exhale sin with every […]
They weigh more than yesterday, their bodies engorged by a grand contradiction, thinning skin swelled like this breakfast sausage askitter in the pan. I’m learning over your shoulder how you bring yourself pleasure, fascinated at the deftness of your silences, breathing even held to a fine point. A beautiful girl is diminished. Somewhere their laughter […]
In the air the still distant and uproarious smoke scaling the dark rungs of trees to unwind into twists of small shadow eaten by the clouds. The crematorium is just one thin spoke of ritual holding us at bay, and what a kind dictator to present death only as a shroud. Forgive me, father, for […]