Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line

Thank you all of you bad bad bad bad bitches.

Thanks to ALL my Facebook crew, you know who you are and how you’ve kept me going when the dark was deep.

Special thanks to Peter Conners and Thom Ward and all the staff at BOA for their continued support and friendship. Great thanks to the Fulbright Fellowship Program sponsored by the United States State Department which helped support the writing of some of these poems. Thanks to the embassies in Skopje, the Republic of Macedonia, and in Tirana, Albania, for all your work on my behalf and on behalf of art and peace in the Balkans.

Duet” is a performance poem written in two voices. I encourage you to read this poem out loud, improvising the splitting of the two voices, dividing them up in improvisations all your own.

Their complementary ability to see behind and beyond genre and convention was a huge influence on my approach to writing.

this form each end rhyme must repeat as the first sound at the beginning of the next line.

Our Love as an Origami Crane” mentions the great Icelandic singer Björk. The poem is written in a form I invented called the Fold Poem

Why are you frowning? Unfold out your palms: you’ve trained me

The river crawls

between the bankrupt’s

unfinished architecture,

under the stone bridge

built by the Romans

where the man (younger

than me) with one good leg

and one dangling,

misshapen leg, hopped on crutches

carrying a plastic Tupperware tub

pleading for dinars.

What is the gerund for such precise joy?