Staple the ghost to the pagewith your favorite symboland you might find out too muchor end up prosecutingwind for lack of commitmentwhen it blows the clouds arounddescribe the wind with precisiontorture it for a whileit will tell you what you knowsometimes I see the futureis just the past in a suitthat will never be in styleit wears your father’s trilbyshadowing a face that answersyou with a semicolonlinking unrelated factslike a modern oraclea conglomerate employswhen I rattle on like thissaying useless things are truesuch as the Egyptians used marksshaped like cats to divide wordsplease slap me with a hyphenput me back on the shelfnext to that old wooden gameit had complicated rulesfor diagramming our thoughtsabout who we should becomeso we could leave them behindwe played it one whole winterso deeply absorbed we diedthen were reborn as commashappy to go on and on
Thoughts on Punctuation
Feature Date
- April 21, 2023
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Copyright © 2023 by Matthew Zapruder.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Father’s Day (Copper Canyon, 2019), as well as Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017) and Story of a Poem (Unnamed, 2023). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine, and was the Editor of Best American Poetry 2022. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.
March/April 2023
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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Elizabeth Scanlon
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APR has continued uninterrupted publication of The American Poetry Review since 1972, and has included the work of over 1,500 writers, among whom there are nine Nobel Prize laureates and thirty-three Pulitzer Prize winners.
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