Featured Poet – Vladimir Kašnar
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Photo credit: Aleksandra Vrebalov
The wordsmith
Smoke, blue, lifted in midair,
butts in tray, musty
conversation outgrowing midnight,
streaming slow as mist in forgotten orchards,
walled in bastion of books, each
caption of pressed thoughts that
live for the moment of pealing off
the next page, to see the dawn
enter the window of longing views,
and the sun capture the watchman:
with almond eyes, heavy porcelain of love,
centering the fine oval and caught
in his act of scrambled fingers on Olympia’s
qwerty, type bars striking upward, stuck
competing for the rolled parchment, stuck
as the bird of annunciation, the next verse.
The lamp light, shy in the rising daylight,
like a dying candle, plays with the smile of
recognition that the muse lives in the picture on the wall,
while the background chorus chants the orphic call.
From
…because I am from, I am where I am.
Because of
the placenta splashing my back
while I still wallowed in nectar
and swallowed the petals of spring,
witnessed by the free lance midwife,
I am accidental to where I am from:
where inebriated monks,
lifting their habits, dance
on bloody bridges of chastity;
so now I am from where,
with all respect to advertising,
Oberleutnant Kurt survives
and Dag dies,
and the great communicator
woos the contras;
And in spite and because,
I am from
the avenues we call York
and Malcolm X,
and mingle in color and gender,
coexist with my modest,
blouson noir, tabac noir
and further on your chat-noir,
and
because of the hips of a waitress
I am the great sinner
with tears greasing your necklace
no one will ever surpass.
Because my heart will outgrow my chest,
and I spread from East to West,
see you don't cut your heel
in the desert,
on my toenails protruding from sand,
because of
where you and I are from.
Vladimir Kašnar is a psychiatrist that lives and works in New York City. Born and educated in Croatia, he completed his studies in New York. His poems have appeared in Croatian translation in Poezija, and in English in Carpatian Health Resort/It’s a Riot Press, Chicago, IL. His website is www.vladimirkasnar.com