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JOSEPH FASANO

Child Trapped in a Barn Crypt

First the breathless flight              
            from the village, the whip's

small script on your tongue. Then stench, 
            then rest, then silence. You'd not thought
 
such spectacle persisted: thick wool             
            shifting in darkness, each beast

to its own monk's cell.  It was winter, then 
            winter, then winter. Remember the door 

cast open, owl-song
            swirling above you, brittle  

as an orphan's dominion?               
            How you crouched in a piss-laden      
 
cellar, while the blade's hymn 
            whispered for more? Moon-
 
stone, strong-
            box, psalter: You will wait here

alone, into hunger, where the floor's 
            good granite 
 
surrendered, in the crook 
            of your cold-stone 

hollow, in the ghosts
            of the arms of the poor: 

the lamb's blood thick  
            on your jaw now, where the wind's 

wild hand 
            still lays it, saying taste

and see, and surrender,  
            as though filth were the brilliance's door.




10     The Paris-American

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Joseph Fasano is the author of Fugue for Other Hands, due out from Cider Press in January, 2013. His poems have appeared in FIELD, The Yale Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, Boston Review, and other publications. He won the 2008 RATTLEPoetry Prize for "Mahler in New York," and he has been a finalist for the Missouri Review Editors' Prize, the Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books, and the Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition, as well as a Pushcart Prize nominee.  He teaches at Columbia University, among other institutions.  About Fugue for Other Hands, Jeanne Marie Beaumont has written, "...this book  embodies 'further, deeper, wilder'...it is never timid or tamed, has no easy comfort or uplift to offer but immerses us in the disturbances of living on this mortal earth from start to finish."

  
   Next week's poet:

 Christopher DeWeese
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