PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Featured Poet Julia Kasdorf

PoetryMagazine.com

Julia Kasdorf
USA

Julia Spicher Kasdorf has published three collections of poetry with the University of Pittsburgh Press, most recently Poetry in America. Among the previous collections, Eve’s Striptease was named one of Library Journal‘s Top 20 Best Poetry Books of 1998, and Sleeping Preacher won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Great Lakes College’s Association Award for New Writing. Her poems were awarded a 2009 NEA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize and appear in numerous anthologies.

She thinks about the relationships that writers have with the communities and places they come from and also those places they choose to inhabit. Projects along these lines include a collection of essays, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, winner of the 2002 Book of the Year Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature, and a monograph, Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American. She has worked on new editions of Yoder’s 1940 local color classic Rosanna of the Amish, which is set in Centre and Mifflin Counties and Fred Lewis Pattee’s The House of the Black Ring, set in Centre County. With Michael Tyrell she co-edited the anthology, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn. She is a professor of English and Women's Studies at the Pennsylvania State University.

Bat boy, Break a Leg

The student with two studs in his nose

and a dragon tattoo crawling from his collar,

who seems always ready to swoon

from bliss or despair, now flits

At my office door. I will look at his poem

drawn onto a music score and find nothing

to say about chance or HIV.

Only later I’ll think to tell him

the night before I left home, I slept

sadly in our old house until a wing

touched my cheek, tenderly as a breeze.

I woke to black fluttering at my feet,

and a mind fresh from the other side

said don’t turn on the light, don’t

Wake the man, don’t scream or speak.

Go back to sleep. The next morning

I remembered that people upstate

whack them with tennis rackets, that

the Chinese character for good luck

resembles the character for bat—

both so unsettling and erratic—

but it’s bad luck to say good luck

in China, as on stage where they say

Break a leg, so delicate bats

must be woven into silk brocade

and glazed onto porcelain plates.

Next morning, I found a big-eared mouse

with leather folded over his shoulders

hanging from claws stuck in a screen.

All day, my work made me forget, but

then I’d remember, passing the window

where he slept, shaded under the eaves.

He was fine. I was fine. Then at dusk,

he was gone, suddenly. Pale boy dressed in black,

maybe the best that can be said for any of us is that

once we were angelic enough to sleep with strangers.

He touched my cheek. I opened the screen.

He flew in his time. We did no harm.

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