Snow Sucks the Words Out of Us, So We Don’t Have to
Garrett Kurai and Emily Gordon
written on a snow capped car in Brooklyn
My mother said,
This is no place for birds—
words? Not sound but flight.
Try as I my might,
I couldn’t open the can of beings.
They chided her,
tight-lidded spleens.
Life’s not so much permanence—
more like flatulence.
Garrett Kurai’s poems are residents of Monolid, Statement: A Journal of the Creative and Critical Arts at CSULA, (Sic) Vice & Verse, and recited in the Radio Poetique series on the PennSound University of Pennsylvania website. A graduate of NYU’s Creative Writing Program, he lives in his hometown of Los Angeles. When not writing poems, he collects a wall of sound and DJs. His music heroes are Robert Wyatt and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
Emily Gordon grew up in Wisconsin and California and is a longtime journalist and editor. Her poems have also appeared in The Baffler, The Women’s Review of Books, Painted Bride Quarterly, Indie Soleil, HIV Here and Now, Transition, and the Toronto Globe & Mail. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and is a sound improviser for the Dirty Little Secrets show in New York City.