Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Everything
Everything was beautiful and nothing
hurt, Kurt Vonnegut said.
Everything was beautiful
and nothing hurt, the girl
slurred to the artist
at the tattoo parlor.
The word made
flesh isn’t fictional.
It’s beautiful.
It hurts.
Andrea Cohen’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, AGNI online, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Four Way Books will publish her fifth collection, Unfathoming, in early 2017. Other recent books include Furs Not Mine and Kentucky Derby. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Writers House at Merrimack College. (updated 12/2016)