Craig Czury - USA

CRAIG CZURY

Counting The Rings

A woman’s body grows to resemble 
the rolling contours of the earth 
and a man’s face grows to resemble 
her stony crevices

This goes way back
A vision wrought with echoes
Abraham said in both the Bible and Qu’ran 

*

This getting older thing
here’s something I know
the way water in its own scaly time 
cuts through rock
one way to tell is cut it in half
count the rings
another way is to press your ear to it 
better yet with a glass to your ear 
you can hear every word spoken
on the other side
the trees have been doing this
with their roots
the insects underneath the bark 
scrawling it down

~~~~~~

The Bridge

We like to show you
as we’ve imagined resplendent 
width of
air crossing water across air
the span weight of
to the right a beginning
to the left we have beginning 
any notion of god beyond
this space we like to show you 
the hold and letting go each way 
against the
which on most days is not the 
by way of stepping 

CRAIG CZURY is from the coal mining region of northeastern Pennsylvania. He spent fifteen years hitchhiking North America, working odd jobs and studying poetry from European and Latin American poets translated to English. “Growing up in immigrant mining cummunities, English wasn’t my first language, broken English was, in all of its visceral tones and undertones, like poetry.” Author of over 20 books, many of which have been translated into Albanian, Russian, Lithuanian, Spanish, and Italian, his most recent book, Fifteen Stones, is a collection of prose poems from Italy, Chile, Lithuania, and spaces between. craigczury.com