BROWSE Columns
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Poems cannot be.
Not unless they mean something.
No sun of night can be
a star without the humans out
to think
they are, and what but language leaves
green leaves
leaf-green? Go hear a poem
scanned out on the screen or pages
through the I of the beholder, listen
at commas, whitespace
and what's smoldering
between linebreaks, puns spelled
to be scene and....see
the eye's both camera
in action, and dark room
for the real that others bring.
Picture a perfect sphere
called satisfaction of hollow spacetime.
Really, anything you want
to see a poem do,
it does, like free verse
that you thought this sonnet was.
A. Z. Foreman is a linguist currently pursuing a doctorate at the Ohio State University. His work (including original poetry and short stories, as well as translations from Arabic, Spanish, French, Persian, Chinese, Latin, Hebrew, Dutch, Occitan, Ukrainian, Russian, Old English, Welsh, Irish, Yiddish, Ugaritic and Esperanto) has been featured in the Threepenny Review, ANMLY, Rattle, the Los Angeles Review and elsewhere including two people's tattoos but not yet the Starfleet Academy Quarterly or Tattooine Monthly. He wants to pet your dog.
