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# One Poem by Stacy Szymaszek
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/one-poem-by-stacy-szymaszek/
- Published: 2020-03-11T11:00:14.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:39:01.000Z
- Description: Our poetry editor, Wendy Xu, has selected one poem by Stacy Szymaszek for her monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.
- Author: Wendy Xu
- Tags: Poetry, Hyperallergic Poetry, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:41 (2019, 2020, part 2)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2020/03/28403626451_931d48e692_k.jpg)

Elaine de Kooning’s “Bullfight” (1959) at the Denver Art Museum (photo by Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)

## Blood of a Poet

1.

I breathe in the downstairs couple’s routine meals  
today some kind of stew do I live on Pluto  
or another celestial snowball?

draining bath water sounds like a minimalist score  
with peopled melody my artifacts are enough  
in order we don’t want more exes especially if “a lesbian  
mode” might not be known in 20 years

ME TANGERE call me anti-Christ the bond must  
be physical the tomb peopled observe my artifacts  
an ant farm with a queen she asks but haven’t we always  
been besieged?  
jeered dream of a nonviolent mafia  
kill them  
with  
kind-  
ness

2.

heard my name on Ludlow oh God there’s another one

*I know the names…* 
*I know. But I do not have the proof. I don’t even have clues.*

retraced steps on the grid  
in the change city  
split bowl of Italian chicory her hand squeezed my  
side keeping pace with  
a monk’s heart

*I’m an adorable reindeer* 
*Why don’t I fit in?*

structures set up to be weird heaven  
earth

as if I showed up to my memorial in a  
a colorful jacket greeted by a controversy  
of poets

3.

author augment  
authentic those with police powers

procedural lovers  
bewitched in spaces of yielded sway

*the world is of infinitely great roughness* 

the music is not what it is said to be held  
hell tonic sound

CHOCOLATE SARDINES

outside the ice cream shop

we speak silent  
solve silent  
then herein

4.

mid-age morning  
vulnerability wakened fists at chest  
bald and breathing like a baby again doing something last night  
if a frame can be surmised that I cannot do

what is it in me that does that?

hopping down a city block on one foot past the guards  
as the city and my foot grows with my hate and love

why did I turn the east side of my Great Lakes city into New York City  
replete with bells of St. John’s and the garrets of elder visionaries left to us

a former friend started to make a casserole but I couldn’t stay and I couldn’t tell  
her took her spool of ribbon to Lake Park giving her the chance

to become a no-show…

*whatever can come to a woman can come to me*

5.

a good café will not have  
robots doing pour-overs we come up against the academy  
and make panic work for us I want men  
like Elaine de Kooning painted them doing nothing  
and not solemn about it even JFK  
and poets that wipe their faces with time  
what you think is what you do the long take I entered the archive  
and got a sick stomach  
too much coffee  
plus inexorable rings too many barrels of ink  
too many separate accounts of our making

6.

not since puberty had I been so  
antagonized she peaked to the very next week  
decline except for the ability to amply tell of it  
to those who will bear the sight  
of me  
A WALKING GROVE OF TREES  
faculty meetings  
Vatican-mind  
hide the villains  
from the victims I have pension-envy keep it paranoid

*facere facilis*

the delusional one will only come away with 10% of your meaning

late nights via crackling line  
we portray each other in a way  
that makes us feel human again

like de Kooning I am devoted to portraits  
the thousands of sketches I make of you to know how you are  
if you are  
human

\*\*\*

Stacy Szymaszek is the author of five books of poetry, most recently *A Year From Today* (2018). Nightboat will publish her next book, *Famous Hermits*, in 2021\. Szymaszek was the director of the Poetry Project from 2007 to 2018\. Last year she was the Hugo Visiting Writer at the University of Montana and Poet-in-Resident at Brown University. She is the recipient of a 2019 grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.