Alan Shapiro published two books in January 2012: Broadway Baby, a novel, from Algonquin Books, and Night of the Republic, poetry, from Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Broad leaves of bittersweet enveloping the dead and dying trees, flourishing up the trunks and out across the lower branches, to the few abandoned nests they haven’t yet invaded: every leaf now almost seeming to signal something to no one about the [...]
Pervasive ghostly whatnot of the felt invisible streaming back and forth of mass- less particles that anything with mass reels out of itself to reel in whatever’s smaller (how, by what means, pulling with what, or pressing?) along crossing and cris [...]
I used to feel like a new man
After the day’s first brew.
But then the new man I became
Would need a tall one too.
As would the new man he became,
And the new one after him
And so on and so forth till the new men made
The dizzy room go dim [...]
I was the one dead inside the music—
my voice forever in the cave of it,
shaping the quick clay
of syllables into songs of praise.
I was the one dead inside the praise
that praised you, “singing your praises.”
I was the one dead in [...]
Spare me the judgment seat, the immaculate apron with its little chains. Spare me the old saw of a tooth for a tooth, and the pearly whites of the good doctor who brings the blinding bright light down. Spare me That eternal lidocaine. That leaden [...]
I stop beyond the pasture
in the dark crease
between hills
that rise so steeply
that the only
light left is in
the tops of trees.
I stop where the snow
I have to stomp through
not to slip on
will not break,
bracing myself
against rough [...]
We parents signed in and entered the waiting area of the boys’ ward that doubled as a family room during visiting hours. We migrated to the far corners of the room, as far away as possible from one another, as if afraid of contagion. Maybe it was easier that way for us to think, “My kid is different from theirs; he isn’t really fucked up or suicidal, or violent; he’s just going through a rough patch, a phase.” We sat in silence, waiting for our sons; under bright fluorescent lighting that gave us all a sickly pallor, we looked anywhere but at each other; we looked at the rubber furniture, the grimly cheerful yellow walls, the message boards here and there scribbled over with institutional graffiti: goals for the day, prayers, bromides, warnings, rules. We were seeking some measure of privacy in a room whose every feature declared No Privacy Allowed.
Sun flickers through the trees beyond the window outside the room in which we sit all morning, talking around the table whose wooden surface quickens with shuttled light and shade, leaf shadow and sun both weaving and woven, each by each, as if the [...]
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