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   Jacket 33 — July 2007        Jacket 33 Contents page        Jacket Homepage

Stephen Sturgeon: Two poems

This piece is about 2 printed pages long.
It is copyright © Stephen Sturgeon and Jacket magazine 2007.

Friday

Tomorrow my reputation will be cooked,
a choice klepto among workers in glaze,
and I can say what anybody says.

Idle forces ram their token
densities, driftwoods, tokens
of dismissal into vacuums

known helplessly
by alcoholic babies
in grasshopper doll clothes.

I’ll be working all night.
The key is in the shingle.
There are many complications
to love.


Fired

That is a judgment
of value and recompense.
We might speak of lightning
what vaults from the ground
to electrocute a cloud
or sinks from cloud to ground;

which of these is better,
reflux in the wicked
or in the merely damned;

and nothing is wasted
like when the sink drinks
water your glass missed
or you leave the radio playing
in the room and animals
listen to what you can’t.

Stephen Sturgeon lives near Boston, Massachusetts. His poetry has appeared recently in Fulcrum and Harvard Review.

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