Jason Shinder

Jason Shinder (1955–2008) was an American poet who authored three books and founded the YMCA National Writer’s Voice. His last book, Stupid Hope (Graywolf Press, 2009), was released posthumously.

 

 

 

ARROW BREAKING APART
Jason Shinder

While lovers sleep, I dig my nails into the earth,
 
holding up traffic. Just now a cloud has pulled up
while I was talking to the Emptiness
 
of the Universe and my voice plugged into the waves
 
at the bottom of the ocean.
My heart is taped up like a child’s drawing
 
of the moon over the broken window of the sky
 
where the wind always comes back to fill my lungs.
I will dance on my shadow. I will open my mouth
 
with the air inside my mother’s coffin.
 
I will be the arrow breaking apart in the body
of the blackbird, which appears at my window, singing.
 
=====
 

THE NEW YEAR
Jason Shinder

I will dive to the bottom of the hotel pool and find my mother’s hairpin.

With the mouth of a drowning woman on my lap,
I will add her breath to mine. In the dark, I will lay the thin white sheet

of the moonlight over the blue plums of my wife’s breasts.

With the new planet I discovered just when I thought I was losing my sight,
I will love another man because I will be a woman.

Everything important will never as yet have happened. Let it happen.

I will throw a lit match on the secrets my body
has kept from me and stand in the fire. The people I have sawed in half

will appear in my bedroom mirror, getting dressed.