About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Sit Coms: how well they understood its relation to the comic: Lucy stuffing her mouth with both chocolates and consequence— then with Ethel, in cut-n-dry black-and-white, stomping grapes as if they were globules of female inequity. Later, Ricky waiting for the miraculous birth (miraculous, because the parents […]
BJ Ward
BJ Ward: Madagascar
When Juanita, my Toyota Corolla, finally died seven years after our divorce, coughing her last oily “Rosebud” of gray combustion to the gated junkyard hanging above all our heads, her own radio crackled that she’d idle eternally with Buick 8’s and Studebakers, then her radio died too. I tooted her horn and surmised her speedometer, […]
BJ Ward: (untitled)
At the wedding, the divorced photographer said to his student apprentice, “Shoot the roses. You’ll get everything else.”
BJ Ward
BJ Ward is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Jackleg Opera: Collected Poems 1990-2013 (North Atlantic Books), which received the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. His poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The New York Times, and The Sun, among others, and have been featured on NPR’s “The Writer’s […]
BJ Ward: ROY ORBISON’S LAST THREE NOTES
12 mph over the speed limit on Route 80, I realize the way I know the exact size of my bones is the way I know I am the only one in America listening to Roy Orbison singing “Blue Bayou” at this precise moment right now, and I feel sorry for everyone else. Do they […]
BJ Ward: Jimmy Vivino and Bruce Springsteen at Convention Hall, Asbury Park, NJ
They trade licks like compliments and the horns are scurrying to keep up, like one family scrambling to pay the suddenly-raised rent. Max catches on and tumbles a charging rhinoceros’s heartbeat into the mix. Everyone is seriously playing when Ed Manion’s fingers climb up the neck of his sax as if they were the four […]