by Susan Aizenberg

— after watching Man on Wire

Like an acrobat in the spotlight
of a darkened circus ring,

or like Baryshnikov
at thirty, easy in his skin,

one graceful hand soft
on the barre—close up, black

silks billowing in the misted wind,
he’s slender & erect, smiles

as he struts the shivering cable
a quarter mile above the city.

But from below, he seems more
human, a fragile speck

against the stark immensities
of sky & doomed

towers. One step, one moment’s lapse,
as he’ll explain, above death.

Is this why he grins, why he lies
down along the braided wires,

one leg dangling over
the abyss? See how he kneels—

kneels!—and looks down
at the wondering crowd. How can

we help but love him? Even
a transit cop who hasn’t missed

much sounds awed: He was dancing.
You couldn’t call it walking. Even the lover

he’s about to betray still trembles,
decades later, remembering.

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Susan Aizenberg’s newest collection, A Walk with Frank O’Hara and Other Poems, is forthcoming in 2024 in University of New Mexico Press’s Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series. She’s also author of Quiet City (BkMk) and Muse (SIUP). Her awards include the VCU/Levis Reading Prize and the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including On the Seawall, Plume, Nine Mile, North American Review, and Blackbird.

by Susan Aizenberg

What I took to be a slim wire
lost on the pavement
turned out to be a tiny snake
that whipped itself around
the panicked toe of my kindergarten
saddle shoe. What I believed
the smoke from a swallowed cigarette,
burning in a young bully’s belly,
turned out to be only the mist
of his breath rising on the chilly air
of a foreign cold snap one rare
North Miami morning. It turned out
to be a stone outside our window,
not a dead deer curled
beneath the oak, and that cry
through the bedroom wall
was not a hungry baby, but only
our neighbor’s cat left too long alone.
That bite from some nasty bug
off the Smith Corona floor blackening
the skin beneath my jeans turned
out to be a third-shift splash
of the sulfuric acid it was my job
to dip the metal parts in,
and that closet I discovered,
jerry-rigged from textbooks,
around my son’s third-grade desk,
a small prison his teacher’d built
to wall him off when he couldn’t stop
talking out of turn. It wasn’t a starburst
we saw that summer evening as we left
the theater, just a woman’s sun-struck
hair. At first we’d thought it was snow
falling on the camps and trains
in the famous movie, those ashes
I learned were the words a friend
would speak one day, explaining to me
the transgressions of the Jews.
And what I thought the face of love
forever turned out to be heat
shimmering like water on a distant
blacktop, tar rising and then cracking
like my own lustful, fickle heart.

—after Stern

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Susan Aizenberg is the author most recently of Quiet City (BkMk Press 2015) and editor, with Erin Belieu, of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia UP 2001). Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in blackbird, Summerset Review, NAR, Bosque, and elsewhere. Her new chapbook, First Light, is forthcoming from Gibraltar Editions in 2020 in a limited, letterpress edition. She lives and writes in Iowa City and teaches in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.