Tony Leuzzi's most recent book of poems is The Burning Door (Tiger Bark Press 2014). In 2012, BOA editions published Passwords Primeval, Leuzzi's interviews with 20 American poets. A book review writer for The Brooklyn Rail, Leuzzi is also a visual artist whose paintings incorporate erasure and collage. He lives in Rochester, NY.---------
[April 3, 2015]
No
givens, only
the imagination,
a dreamed-
up
dream, a story
borrowed from another
story
read
on a plane to—
no, that is another
story.
Fine.
I’ll change the names
to protect everyone.
No one
will
hurt anymore.
No crying and pointing
it was
you
who did this, you
who made me what I am,
what I
fear
from everyone
and can’t bear to see in
myself—
No.
No more givens
or assumptions. Only
a gold
ring
of dust around
the ashtray, three pencils
with worn
down
erasers and
a tin lampshade tilted
like a
green
fedora on
the head of an uncle
from Queens.
Word Problem
The
distance between
Town A and Town B is
ninety-
five
kilometers.
At 2:14, a car
from Town
A
and a truck from
Town B barrel towards each
other.
If
the car is red
and the truck is yellow
which one
more
resembles the
brilliant glare of flowers
left with
coins
and photographs
beside the crosses of
the dead?
Swath
I
thought his gift strange—
a long wool scarf in the
middle
of
May. I thought it
stranger still that one week
later—
once
the soft purple
of early vanguards had
given
way
to a brazen
swath of crimson tulips—
a hoar
frost
covered the stems
and stamens and the bright
turned black.