John Surowiecki

Birds at the Speed of Light

They leave their songs behind, cheerful orphans
of sound settling in air pockets,
drifting upward to the lower darknesses of
space which scare them a little.

Firebirds and other poor gassy birds of the spirit:
and hand-carved songbirds: struggle with
paralysis: and are ignorant of the world's
windows and walls and rusted fences

which actual birds avoid with ease:
diving and spinning and abruptly turning at speeds
that ignite the air and bring them eventually to us,
to our feeder and our scatterings of dried dead worms.

My Life as a Young Fish

I was too beautiful to eat: or so said the monsters:
like a fish but not a fish: fish-shaped but
without a fishy stink. I swerved and glided
through streams and lakes and all the rest:
that was when I had gills and sucked
the good air out of foul brown water.

My mother wanted to build a little house inside
the little house inside her. My first thought was:
hell yes: stay swaddled in fat and fluid, asquirm in
sperm: or whatever that creamy stuff was. True:
I feared the bellowed hellos and koochie-
kooing forefingers of the future but: I,

U-shaped, with big teeth, receding hairline
and a nine o'clock shadow, was a child of science:
not easily fooled or bedazzled.
I believed waves were the bodies
of water-babies like myself,
smashed to death against beachhead rocks:

but I knew that wasn't true.
Waves were agents of adjustment,
ticktocks of clockworks,
measures of remorse and condolence
and pulse and love and, only now
and then, the thuds of grief.

John Surowiecki is the author of fifteen poetry books of various sizes and shapes. Last year, The Place of the Solitaires: Poems from Titles by Wallace Stevens, was published by Wolfson Press. His Chez Pétrouchka, a long poem that gives the Stravinsky's puppet a voice—albeit crude and nasty—recently came out from Bass Clef Books.

Surowiecki is a former poetry instructor at Manchester Community College and serves as associate  editor of the Connecticut River Review.

Surowiecki is also the recipient of the Poetry Foundation Pegasus Award for his verse-play My Nose and Me (A TragedyLite or TragiDelight in 33 Scenes), which was presented by the Foundation at the Shakespeare Theater in Chicago as part of the Poetry on Stage series. Other prizes include: the Nimrod Pablo Neruda Prize, the Washington Prize, the White Pine Prize, a Connecticut Poetry Fellowship, and a silver medal in the Sunken Garden National Competition. Also: his Pie Man won the 2017 Nilson Prize for a First Novel.

Poetry publications include Alaska Quarterly Review, AMP, Carolina Quarterly, Folio, Gargoyle, Innisfree, Margie, Oyez Review, Mississippi Review, Nimrod International Journal, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Redivider, Rhino, The Florida Review, The Southern Review, Tupelo Quarterly, West Branch and Yemassee.