Because Everything Now Is Violence
My friend suggests one thing then another.
And isn’t that how it begins, the gospel
of naming one thing then another: The magnet,
the turbine. The carapace, the turtle.
The smile, the shutter-click. The spool,
the unspooling. The cracked teeth,
the apology. And isn’t it human how we expect,
after the apology, the forgiveness,
how we pray for the ceasefire and the forgetting,
one prayer after another, when we could
be praying for a thin strip of heavy snow, patched
in the notch of a June mountain like a drip
under a faucet, frozen in the act of dripping. Stopped
before it was one thing, then another,
an avalanche that left everyone alive.
Susan Cohen was an award-winning science writer, contributing writer to the Washington Post Magazine, and faculty-member at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism before earning an MFA from Pacific University. She’s the author of Democracy of Fire (2022) and two previous full-length collections. Her poetry has appeared in 32 Poems, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Southern Review, Verse Daily, and won the Red Wheelbarrow Prize, Terrain Annual Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize Special Mention. She lives in Berkeley. www.susancohen-writer.com