Stacy Szymaszek
four poems from ABOUT THE HOUSE
13/ The Studio
I sit and think and in thinking
I mind my own business
the thermodynamics tending toward a perfect crystal
stray night visions of those whose dominion is a city
of leveraged humans
content to be so ( an ethic )
but knowing it’s no longer my business
no skin off my behind bitterness drawn out by a poultice
plant pedagogy in poetry
rocking in the chair formerly known
as office toes on the floorboards
another sunny frigid day
what is now February
the Wednesday of the year
my shadow playing with heart-shaped leaves
lead pencil in my hat Privately
pirated
everyone can know where our hearts are ( pocket, a book
symbolizing all books that amaze )
our charms ( a Roman coin
against all coercion )
and still wonder how we do this ( an ethic )
not a cloud not a curious crow
but five starlings in the gutter
and the humid bluster from the neighbor’s dryer vent
I kept saying “myriad” when I meant “chimera”
along the rural route to the rural room where I began
to make nothing happen
again
( an ethic ) an address
where proper mourning
may not have occurred
14/ The Bathroom
the public sphere has been drained
you cannot purchase a conjugal tub
or any tub right now
the onus
on the individual
is a sinker a heavy rate
of sink
to make sense
as steadily
or as rapidly
as we breathe
not only would I not trust fall
into anyone’s economic decisions
I take upright
hip-baths
in my own hideout
too much reading on the can
a literary joke book
extratemporal hemorrhoids
“ur-acts of making”
eyes follow the exposed pipes
various holes and poles from other owners
other bathers
down to the small piles of light
blue cleansing powder
from a tippy container
over to the orange liquid pine soap
hot water swirl
the belief
to drain
the recurring dream
the last night
for last night
17/ The Living Room
habits can chill or charm on a dime
on the couch wearing boots
not using a coaster for my coffee
we make room for the other’s pretenses our never-ending acts of
becoming where refusals however ancient
still furnish some important and harmless fantasy
that I am part of a sloppy collective
a living person looks into the living rooms of the dead
where photographs of rooms are in the dossier
and it is most impossible in those moments
to understand outer space or the heavens
how the person is not going about their day
their subtler proclivities synthesized
and passed on to people living in rooms
till doomsday people who are artists finding rooms
and living in them ad infinitum
deriving derivative the dossier
a practical and calming notion
of afterlife
18/The Kitchen
recitation of expiring produce used in the dish
is the love language
bent around an outsized white wafer table
we call it pie or a tray bake
grub first
then ethics
2/22/22 the centenary
of Eleanore’s birthday
the last occurrence this century
an old world portal where smells
waft in from as recently as last April’s
lemon oil left as a welcome
to the house
and as ancient as
Polish sour soup
one catches the drift
what a house meant to the relatives
of the displaced number 11
her features
boot prints in snow
a noble
Polish work ethic
a steeped tea
of Bismarckian
labor for your life
whereas sometimes I may think
a role
is beneath
me
only then does the forced heat
gust from her eyes
Stacy Szymaszek is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently The Pasolini Book (Golias Books, 2022). She is the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant in poetry. From 2007 to 2018, she was the director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York City. She currently lives in the Hudson Valley, where she is an educator and a freelance consultant for arts and social justice nonprofits.
Read next: Poetry by Nathaniel Mackey