Poem of the Week: "Century" by Joel Brouwer
Joel Brouwer's first book of poems, Exactly What Happened (Purdue University Press, 1999), won the Verna Emery Poetry Prize and the Larry Levis Reading Prize. He has received fellowships from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, Boston Review, Chelsea, Paris Review, Parnassus, Ploughshares, The Progressive, etc. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and teaches at the University of Alabama. His book Centuries is available from Four Way Books.
Century
The art in the museum, exhausted and damp, demanded solitude. We're tired of crying your tears! We hereby decree the purifying change and henceforth reject the trash! Now scram! When curators offered to compromise by admitting only the blind, the art replied by suicide: each piece became a mirror. Beneath a bench we found a photograph of Eva Braun and Hitler locked in a deep wet kiss. She's nude, milk-blue against his black uniform. He has a riding crop in each hand. We shoved to see. Such a beautiful picture! It had to be: it was that or the mirrors.
From "Centuries" by Joel Brouwer. Copyright 2003 Joel Brouwer. By permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.
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