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Danish Dispatch

January 7, 2026 Dispatches

Copenhagen, Denmark

My grandfather sits in a recliner and watches infomercials on television. It is 2:57 in the afternoon on an American Sunday and a man wearing a cheap suit tries selling him the New King James Version Bible in twelve parts on CD.

I call from Copenhagen where the time is 8:57pm and the sun has already set. An electronic operator speaks words in Danish I cannot decipher before the static spindles through air and across several oceans until my grandfather picks up his landline.

Harmony Presbyterian Church, he says into the phone. This is his greeting. No Hello or Can I help you? He has no caller ID and does this to defend himself against telemarketers. He tells me, If you answer with the name of a church, they are not allowed to sell you anything, and then purses his lips and nods his head one time, each time he says this.

U N C O N T A I N A B L E

April 27, 2000 Issue 31, Issue 31 Poetry, Poetry

By L. S. KLATT

I leave the house unlocked & walk to the garage jacked to
The White Stripes. My mouth is a guitar; snow is in the sound hole.
Spring. I think it’s spring. The automatic door leaps

in its tracks & is music again. I record on my phone a soundwave
as the GTO convertible wheels out of its tomb, the driveway
chartreuse with maple wings. Tell White I’ll cut some garlic

in his mother’s garden; I’ll wear a rhinestone button-down
studded with garnets. Finger the fretboard with licks
& withdrawals. And toe-tap the pedal

if I don’t screw up again. If I don’t give up listening
to the leafing of lettuces. Won’t be long
before I could care less.

[Purchase Issue 31 here.]

L. S. KLATT’s poems have appeared widely: The New Yorker, Harvard Review, The Believer, Image, VOLT, The Southern Review, and Pleiades. He is the author of five collections, including Cloud of Ink, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, and most recently Saint with a Peacock Voice.

The Grave Fox

April 27, 2000 Issue 31, Issue 31 Poetry, Poetry

By DANIEL TOBIN

Like a dog truant among the tended plots
it turns back toward us a considerate eye
as though sensing the disquiet of our being

lost here among all the unfamiliar graves
that would be landmarks proving the right way
if this were the way we’d believed it to be.

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Danish Dispatch

U N C O N T A I N A B L E

The Grave Fox

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