Andrew Zawacki

Posted on September 25, 2024 by Posit Editor

from These Late Eclipses

Manufactured Housing

Lit like unto a Vegas casino—permanent sunset, nor window nor clock—day does its un-nuanced thing: frisbee tossing, data drift, a wacky inflatable tube man, breakdancing into the rhodium glare. Over there, in the Öpik–Oort cloud: immobile mobile homes, on rented land.

These Fugitive Apparitions—

pale in the argentine cast of midair—and how we came under their riverine spell, arriving at figurations wherein a trace conceals, or cancels out, the whole. My wife lies down at nightfall: leonine. As an arc of slow light. Breathless in the sharded dark, I read her arousal like braille.

Breech Baby

I remember the doctor tried to flip my younger daughter over—one part primitive wrestling match, his forearms greased to knead the womb, and one part sci-fi shadow play, tectonic on a screen: she wouldn’t budge. We worried then she’d be insolent, hard. Now I think: good.

Verkhoyansk, 100.4º F

A surveying crew is out measuring a fraction of a / fraction of a fraction / of the earth. Case numbers over 14 days are trending ~~+52%~~ +65%. Having shucked the sweetcorn, I chuck the husks at the brink of the woods, as dark is swooning in. The forecast calls for air conditioning.

Droste Effect

Inflicted, inflected: a scar cemented in air. Scare quotes blight my cornea: phosphor luminance, after-eclipse. World not long for this world. Under a hematoma sun, everyone I know’s been broken down, like a cardboard box. My demons hounded by demons of their own.

Andrew Zawacki is the author of Unsun: f/11, Videotape, Petals of Zero Petals of One, Anabranch, and By Reason of Breakings, as well as four books in France. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, and elsewhere. With fellowships from the NEA, Centre National du livre, and French Voices, he translated Sébastien Smirou’s My Lorenzo and See About. Zawacki also edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 and edited and co-translated Aleš Debeljak’s Without Anesthesia: New and Selected Poems. He was a 2016 Howard Foundation Poetry. These Late Eclipses is due in spring, 2025 from Verge Books.