“Writing With My Shoes On” is
a title for a poem. “Then I Did
Something Stupid” is better
for a short story. The trash smells
because living things decompose
isn’t the name of anything just
a way of describing these environs.
To say I miss you in French
one says “tu me manques” where
“tu” means you. Do the French
miss less because their you is
there before them? Syntactical
high jinks: methinks Americans
don’t miss the missed-one
so much as feel how absence
crowds the I. Today my others are
far from me. “I”— is
the name of this feeling.
From “The Pedestrians,” copyright 2014 by Rachel Zucker. Reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books.
Rachel Zucker is the author of nine books, most recently, a memoir, “MOTHERs,” and a double collection of prose and poetry, “The Pedestrians.” Her book “Museum of Accidents” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2013. Zucker teaches poetry at New York University.
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