Sy Safransky

May 1994

Perfect Rooms

The language is so much bigger than I am, so much older, more beautiful. How can I hope to tame it, cram it into a style?

My Day In Court

I’d rather be at my desk, shuffling my own papers. But a friend confided recently that he couldn’t abide self-important types who considered themselves too busy for jury service.

Who Forgets My Name

Mother who falls / past me, who wants / what I cannot give her, / the peace I never found. / I never stopped looking / for you. In every woman. / In every day that sooner / or later let me down.

Twenty

The Sun tries to be different: a journal that lives at the margins of popular culture without making a religion out of it, that acknowledges our kinship with one another by what we don’t print as well as what we do.

By Fire And Water

An Interview With Michael Meade

All this violence is a fire screaming for the water of human attention. I don’t think we’re going to be able to keep going unless we deal with it. To me the two big events of the last two years are the fires in L.A. and the flooding of the Mississippi River. I think they are strangely related.

December 1993

Bigger Than Words

Oh Freedom, I knelt at your feet but you said, Not now. So I threw myself at Love. Love said, Is it me you want, or Freedom?

Nothing Personal

I asked the post office clerk why she was smiling. She said she’d just gotten off the phone with a woman who insisted her mail wasn’t being delivered. I asked what was funny about that. The clerk rolled her eyes. She said the caller was upset because all she received were bills, never personal letters.

Venice Shimmers

Meanwhile, less than a day’s drive from here, the fighting continues in Bosnia, where tens of thousands have been killed or displaced, where starvation and concentration camps and rape hotels have become weapons in a campaign of ethnic extermination. Yet Washington is by and large indifferent, as Bosnia sits on no oil fields and sends neither Democrats nor Republicans to Congress.

On The Bus

He brushes the pastry crumbs off his shirt, speeds up as we approach a blind curve, and passes the car in front of us. He jokes about the frightened gringo behind him whose knuckles are whiter than his face.

June 1993

Another Coincidence

Not enough time for the poem. But the poem staggers to its feet, wipes its face on the dirty towel, remembers it lives here too, remembers it needs no invitation.