Robert Hershon is the editor of Hanging Loose Press and executive director for The Print Center. He has written eleven books of poems, most recently The German Lunatic. A reviewer once called him "the poet of the F word and the F train," so he is glad to have found this anthology.

 

 

 

 

 

Neighbors

 

The conversation consisting of

thud and fuck you

Something heavy hits the wall

A picture shifts

Fuck you, she shouts, fuck you

 

A dish or a glass.  No, a bottle.

Fuck you, she shouts, you motherfucker,

you fucking motherfucker, fuck you

 

I want to reach through the wall with

an armload of sharpened intensifiers –

You mongoose bowel, you cabinet of phlegm,

you guppy-hearted elbow pipe –

so that, if when she bleeds, the Red Sea,

she can end the refrain, thrust home

 

But does it matter what she shouts,

but that she shouts, against thud

and push, any words, any arithmetic

One fuck you plus one fuck you

is one fuck you     Some days, I suppose,

only the classics will do

 

 

 

from The World, # 58 (2002)