Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Modern Lucrezia
for Andrea del Sarto
Tell me my modern Lucrezia
Why it is this or that
Or occasionally also when we
Find our loves together.
The reasons for the reasons
You have given me I sometimes question.
But it is only in dim light I know
Answers to facts which answer nothing.
You say I breathe life to your lips
Although your return is graveyard cold.
I feel the falling out has come for
You no longer know my pain.
When the jester spoke to the fool
They both revealed nothing.
My Lucrezia, the piers are splintering
And the shade of you no longer cools.
My body snags truth
_ _like a nut zipped up
_in a drunken man’s fly
Stuart Dischell is the author of Children with Enemies (University of Chicago Press, 2017), as well as Good Hope Road, a 1991 National Poetry Series Selection (Viking, 1993); Evenings & Avenues (Penguin, 1996); Dig Safe (Penguin, 2003); and Backwards Days (Penguin, 2007). Dischell’s poems have been published in journals such as The Atlantic, The New Republic, AGNI, Slate, The Kenyon Review, and in anthologies including Essential Pleasures, Hammer and Blaze, The Pushcart Prize, and Good Poems. A recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at University of North Carolina Greensboro. He is a contributing editor of AGNI. (updated 4/2019)
Dischell’s first full-length collection Good Hope Road was reviewed in AGNI 40 by Joseph Lease.
Dischell’s collection Evenings & Avenues was reviewed in AGNI 46 by George Weld.