Walking Through
I’ve had enough of phone-hold music
blasting through galaxies of deserted
planetariums, of pinkie ring pledges
and nude panty hose lies. Enough
of parties without hard liquor and hotel beds
with overly soft pillows. I don’t want
to polish my car’s hubcaps only to see
my image distorted by its curves.
I’ve had more than enough of the stench
of train elevators and of people who don’t
understand the clairvoyance of cats.
I’ve had it with those who think
their indifference makes their hair resemble
the wind in a lost Douglas Sirk melodrama.
I’m sick of dreams, both daydreams and
the 2 am visits that turn one’s heart into
a falling ax. I’m tired of things not being dreams,
of how the orange dusk keeps vibrating
with the television’s violence. I’m sick
of political poetry and anti-political poetry.
I hate how time has turned my skin inside out,
how the glowing outlines of the missing
keep haunting the newspapers’ edges.
Instead of this neon noise, I want
my bones’ silence amplified, then sliced
into ribbons of sky. I want to wake up
and hear my own brain shaking the rafters
of my own small thoughts.
*
Old Year
On the first day of the Fire Horse
Lunar New Year, a woman holds twenty
tulips to her chest, pink ones
on the inside, yellow on the edges.
Every day is some kind of new year.
On December 31st, I watched flamenco
dancers stomp a backroom stage,
their red fans blocking drunk revelers
on the restaurant’s giant screens.
On Rosh Hashanah, I stuffed my face
with honey cake, then next morning
as if it were any other day took
the train to teach. At lunch, instead
of throwing my sins in the river, I dunked
hard bread in a plastic container
of Thai chicken soup. Each day I wake up,
and instead of regret I feel hopeful I will
discover a new new year, a new way to feel
how it feels to feel new, but at today’s
morning Zoom I sprinted to the kitchen
when I realized I was sipping yesterday’s
cold coffee not today’s hot. Honestly,
they both tasted equally good. Makes me
think instead of always going gaga
for the new we need a holiday
for praising the old. I want a ritual for
old year’s day, a time to grab the least
pilled sweater from the slightly dirty pile,
to rub arthritis cream on the crease
between midnight and now.
*
Joanna Fuhrman is the author of seven poetry books, including Data Mind (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press 2024.). Her poems have appeared on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, The Slowdown podcast, and in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry 2023 and 2025 anthologies. An Assistant Teaching Professor in creative writing at Rutgers University, she first published in Hanging Loose Magazine as a teenager and became a co-editor in 2022.