Arse Poetica

A. Z. Foreman

Arse Poetica

Poems cannot be.
Not unless they mean    something.
             No sun of night can be
a star    without the humans out
                                                       to think
they are,     and what but language leaves
             green leaves
                         leaf-green?     Go hear a poem
scanned out on the screen   or   pages
through the I of the beholder,    listen
at commas, whitespace
and what's smoldering
between linebreaks, puns spelled
to be scene and....see
the eye's both camera
       in action, and dark room
for the real that others bring.
       Picture a perfect sphere
called satisfaction of hollow spacetime.

Really, anything you want
to see a poem do,
it does,     like free verse
that you thought this sonnet was.

A. Z. Foreman

A. Z. Foreman is a poet and translator pursuing a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. His work (both original compositions as well as translations from Arabic, French, Persian, Chinese, Latin, Occitan, Ukrainian, Russian, Hebrew, Welsh, Irish and Yiddish) has been (or is scheduled to be) featured in the Los Angeles Review, ANMLY, Asymptote, Lunch Ticket, Metamorphoses, the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry and elsewhere. But really he's most proud of having had his work featured in two people's tattoos, and if you have a dog he'd love to pet it.

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