Volume 16:1, Winter 2015
Sonnet Issue
Watch Your Ears
The interesting thing, what nothing’s doing, no
Help from any notebook and cars still carrying us
Gazillions, time and its fanny-pack, working,
You want to call it that, thorny in its skin.
What if we went somewhere and no one saw
Us leave, thought we were still? Who guesses
What zone it’s in, that rock used as itself
In one corner of the park, and are the trees
Alert or just glad? To be watered by one
With clean eyes hiding water, civil as an orange
Right before the gin is poured. Scared
Right about now, elastic over green charging
Out of the sky to coat the air with sheeted—
Watch your ears—words related to light.
Donald Berger was born in Queens and grew up in NY and MA, attended the University of Massachusetts and the University of Washington, and lived four years in Germany, where he was a Fulbright Fellow. Berger has taught writing and literature at the University of Maryland and Montgomery College, and currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University. Quality Hill, a collection of poems, was published by Lost Roads Publishers (1993), and in March 2014 a bilingual collection, The Long Time, will appear from Wallstein Verlag in Goettingen, Germany. His poems and prose have also appeared in The New Republic, Tri-Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Conjunctions, and Slate.