Skip to main content

Victor Lodato

Victor Lodato is a poet and playwright. A 2002-2003 Guggenheim Fellow, his poems have appeared in The Southern Review, North American Review, Northwest Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal. In 1998, he received the Emily Clark Balch Prize in Poetry from Virginia Quarterly Review.

Author

The Kiss

  Ten, nine, eight, we said. Up till then we only watched the second hand scurry. But now, so close, the numbers possessed us: seven, six, five. As a child I was frightened, exhilarated; I knew what was coming. Four, three, two, and still the w [...]

Edith’s Trailer

When the sky showed its grey, and the wind-whipped sheets slapped and tangled, a white line of lunatic tongues that dripped and licked as you unpinned them, the light was silver, lit your old yellow dress into something young— and, without you movi [...]

Mother and Daughter With Apples

In the attic at 6 De Lairessestraat, skillful young men work under low light. In their hands: pens, carbon paper, blades. An attic in Amsterdam, 1942, where the false identity cards are made— for Jews, or men slated for forced labor in Germany. Sma [...]

Naming the Father

I On the eve of that terrible war we call the world's first, German soldiers trudged toward the future. How many copies of Death in Venice were jammed in travel sacks, next to a mother's gift of stationary and a father's garment offered for the cold [...]

The Hunger Winter

The first time you eat bread after not tasting it for a long time, do not be ashamed if you cry. I am not speaking of the fast from night to morning, but rather the lack from November to March— a winter without the good weight of bread in your stom [...]