Seth Michelson lives in Los Angeles, Calif. He holds degrees in poetry from Johns Hopkins University and Sarah Lawrence College, and a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature from USC, where he is currently pursuing a PhD by reading poetry in relation to political violence in Latin America, the US, and Spain. He also runs the […]
At first you hate them, these parasites who lash roots around a host tree, roots you’d readily take an axe to, merrily merrily whack to bits. But then you’d be a killer, too. And wasn’t the Strangler Fig a lot like you: born of a seed that sprouted limbs reaching skyward for warmth and down […]
Stillborn at sixteen weeks, you prove we exist where we’re erased. That afternoon I watched myself bound away through a snowy field: like a jackrabbit, my legs pumping, like a jackrabbit, my sparkling tracks. By midnight I was lost, baffled by the dark, while I sat in silence on my couch, miles beyond my wife […]
Surveyor, seeker, poet of the sound, you love nothing more than these monkeys aswing in the trees. And carefree you hand out fifties like chump-change to the needy, though your bank book’s a graveyard: filled with dust and hope. Yet your eyes are a mother hen’s and a fighting cock’s. Plus that voice: wind-from-the-reeds, oracular. […]
The rabbi asks all mourners to stand for the kaddish. The man beside me rises and begins to weep as he sings. He wobbles, a yoked ox near collapse, but still pulling. ** Three rows behind me I hear my godfather, a celebrated heart doctor, his singing voice as rich as the burgundy velvet that […]
I was kissed and held and kissed some more by pretty nurses before I made it through childhood surgery on my rotten left hip. But my hospital roommate, Daniel, age ten like me, died one night after dinner, eyes fixed, not breathing, his parted lips stained red with fruit punch, our favorite. Today I limp […]
Seth Michelson, author of Maestro of Brutal Splendor, recommends two poets.
Seth Michelson lives in Los Angeles, Calif. He holds degrees in poetry from Johns Hopkins University and Sarah Lawrence College, and a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature from USC, where he is currently pursuing a PhD by reading poetry in relation to political violence in Latin America, the US, and Spain. He also runs the […]