Jon Sands never runs into the animals he’s scared of, but the list includes grizzly bears, hornets, scorpions, and bull sharks. He landed in New York City a few years ago; the animals there aren’t nearly as frightening as they seem. He is director of poetry and arts education programming at the Positive Health Project, a needle exchange center in Midtown Manhattan.
I have fallen in love with winter, / with the day that ends at 3:45 in the afternoon. // with the man striding along the path grasping / a pink plastic bag that glows incandescent / although it only contains dish soap / and the cat food he carries home after work …
...you wonder again about the soul, / Where it hides, where it ventures. / There's always one you have to bring to oblivion...
I wanted to be gray-faced / and hated by the Yankees / in the suburbs past Carleton.
Once he’d made the long, impetuous trip, / once we were there, evening air billowing my skirt / over the Pacific, surf sweeping like brushes over drums, / I knew we’d marry.
I lived by a river with tides unresolved / Under the house a sewer under a wooden board it ran / Sometimes a tapping sometimes a hum in the night like a motor
and I dream of a young woman from Prague / standing beside a red motorcycle as if so much / depended upon it...
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