Susan Aizenberg Poems

I've been reading Rimbaud again & I must confess
that his beautiful nights & scents of vineyards & beer—
his green lindens—all of it—takes me back, a little,
...

Rain hushes this February morning,
that same infusing chill
that once entered the slim bones
of your hands, until they ached, flushed
...

A Vanished World
If only they'd been purely souls, saints,
or like the ditch weed thriving
against the ghetto wall, could have survived
...

Look: a man is teaching his children to ride
the big waves. Hand in hand in hand they wade out
past the first mild breakers. Icy green fingers
...

Day after day, the fecund, mis-shaped cells
doubled and re-doubled inside her, infused
her blood's unguarded channels and spawned their rank
...

This is Hell, J. says from her hospital bed, and I
don't mean Hell, I mean Hell. Like a comic
lush, she slurs her words, Atavan and morphine
swelling her tongue. Pupils shrunk to motes.
...

Not as a bird with twelve black wings and an eye
and a tongue for each of us. (Someone dies
each time he blinks.) And not shrouded in celestial
light, a fair-haired castrato. Not as Samael,
...

wife is pretty as a wedding cake.
Think Wasp perfection,
Hitchcock's doomed blondes.
Like them, she knows something's up,
...