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GRAHAM FOUST THE USUAL SUSPECTS Ever unable to sit alone in a quiet room, my dad “made something of himself,” and, real and irreal, he often slept, fetal, in what felt like a star in my skull. The day before he died in a quiet room in Wisconsin, I watched a weary fly—left over, somehow, from the summer—check to see if its legs were still there, and then I bludgeoned it. One month later, on a crowded bus in Denver, I made a poem much like this one, and while it was “Language [check], Realism [check], Poetry [check]”—a lineup I thought I could pick myself out of—neither my mercies nor my cruelties seemed entirely sincere. |