Stephen Paul Miller

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For David Shapiro (1947-2024)

I can already see the wall around
paradise lifting

Ecstatic,
I know no difference

between heaven
and this moment,

your garden
and a bell,

a violin and going crazy.

Angel Boss

I wake up ‘n
see
my mother
pulling off my sheet

I look straight ahead
and see my births
layered in
crystal.

I close my eyes
and see
my angel boss
ordering

me around your
sonnet factory.

A Living Force Field

is holding your hand. Turn around.
Here comes the east. A pool
player frets and struts
watching your footsteps
heart in hand over a new aura
some time when you have time.

Around

All the dead
are like a dachshund
following you around.

Tide

She asks
me if
I can
identify

a particular moment.

You mean
the moment, I answer,

when I

become the cliff I hover over

and time goes out with the
tide.

Yes, she

says,

that’s the moment.

Stephen Paul Miller’s nine poetry books include Beautiful Snacks (Marsh Hawk, Fall 2026), and his critical books include The Seventies Now (Duke University Press). He’s co-edited Radical Poetics and Secular Judaism and New Work on New York School Poets. His poems appear in Best American Poetry 2023, 1994 and surrealist and Jewish American anthologies. He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland, and he’s a Professor of English at St. John’s University, NYC.
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About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.