All the other professors emeriti
have shuffled in, neat in jacket and tie
except for the few ladies (flats and hose),
and nobody’s not in hearing aids—both those
with hair to hide the wires and those without,
and (a sub-category) those who shout
their greetings now while sporting a severe
kind of stopper, jammed into the ear
as if to bar the spillage of what remains
(old wine in old bottles) of their brains.
All posts tagged: Mary Jo Salter
A Letter to Leena
I came when you were born,
but soon the flying stopped.
By the time I came again,
we drove in private cars
The Hotel Belvedere
A June day under the Jungfrau.
Near the railway that brought her here,
an old woman sits on a bench.
She isn’t facing the Jungfrau
but the Hotel Belvedere
We’ll Always Have Parents
It isn’t what he said in Casablanca
and it isn’t strictly true. Nonetheless
we’ll always have them, much as we have Paris.
November 2016 Poetry Feature
This month’s feature includes new work by contributors.
Bratislava
So I’m still alive and now I’m in Bratislava.
That’s funny. I hadn’t expected to be alive.
A sign in italics nudges us at the station:
Have an amazing time in Bratislava!
That’s funny: a straight-faced wish, offered in English
and then Slovakian, posted above the trash can
The Gods
I always seem to have tickets
in the third or fourth balcony
(a perch for irony;
a circle of hell the Brits
tend to call ‘The Gods’),
and peer down from a tier
of that empyrean