April Lindner
April Lindner Poems
What if this house were every house
we'd inhabited, lost friends
to startle us from the doorway,
each broken dish seamlessly mended,
...
This collision of teeth, of tongues and lips,
is like feeling for the door
in a strange room, blindfolded.
...
Cold as a slap, this indigo sea,
where we clamber on blonde-fringed rocks,
where someone's tarted up the fishing shacks
with red paint and artful nets.
...
The worst for him was his friend turned wolf,
and the blood that splattered as he ran. The worst
for us: the hospital, his upper lip tugged back
...
The burnt church up the street yawns to the sky,
its empty windows edged in soot, its portals
boarded up and slathered with graffiti,
...
Hard as a fist, with a brain's ripe heft,
it waits, vivid as Christmas on the branch,
enticing birds to eat and scatter seed.
Hedge Apple, Osage Orange, green as sin,
...
Like refugees, they ran off empty handed,
forsaking heirloom china, cutlery,
leaving behind their hands, their tongues and teeth.
...
Though his taste buds were dying and every meal
made him grimace and wonder out loud
why we were such lousy cooks, he kept on
...
April Lindner Biography
Poet April Lindner earned her BA from the University of New Hampshire, an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. Skin (2002), her first collection of poetry, won the Walt McDonald First Book Prize. Lindner has edited three anthologies: Contemporary American Poetry (2004), with R.S. Gwynn; a bilingual anthology of Spanish and English poetry, Lineas Conectadas: Poesia Nueva de los Estados Unidos (2006); and Contemporary Poetry in the United States (2007), a bilingual anthology in Russian and English. She is also the author of the critical study Dana Gioia (2003), published in the Boise State University Western Writers Series. In 2010, she published a young adult novel, Jane. Lindner is a professor in the Department of English at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.)
The Best Poem Of April Lindner
Dream House
What if this house were every house
we'd inhabited, lost friends
to startle us from the doorway,
each broken dish seamlessly mended,
stacked in a limitless cupboard?
All the pets we buried
bumping our ankles, nudging to be fed?
What if this house were every house
we'd longed to live in? My cottage,
shingles weathered a cape cod gray,
your cabin just below the treeline.
All that transpired as planned and all
that surprised us? Paintings
you imagined against closed lids.
Babies we left unconceived,
burbling, squalling, suffering first teeth.
Our daughter as we dreamed her,
on the lawn blowing bubbles,
sleek as an otter, nose
sunburnt, as glad to see us
as if we'd been away.
Would it be a kind of heaven,
a house expanding like a baking loaf,
this full? A consummation?
Like our lives unfolding before us
in the fingersnap between dying and death.
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4/23/2024 3:11:30 PM # 1.0.0.1119
