NEW POETRY

Foolish to be consuming a huge juicy pear

at seventeen degrees of a mid-January day

while the wind whipped so froze my fingers

flushed with the fruit’s water

as the naked skin burned then numbed

in the stripping air young in this year

and even an iota more foolish to be toting

a bilingual book of Borges’ verse

exposed then receiving a drop of dripping

pulp upon the pages’ upright edge, whose stain

no flicker or rub of now warmed finger

could remove, so soaked into the fiber,

now an irregular umbra and penumbra

spreading almost cover to cover, an elongated

oval russet just drying to aged and average

brown, with my volume now maculate with evidence

of experience and error, yet not marring the print,

poetry in either tongue upon the pure white below

so the consequence minor, just a reminder

to consider and be humble at the juncture

of choices as the near future ripens

in atmospheres, measured seasons of promised

heat and the fair recompense of stinging cold.

John Zedolik is an adjunct English professor at Chatham University and Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and has published poems in such journals as Abbey, The Bangalore Review (IND), Commonweal, FreeXpresSion (AUS), Orbis (UK), Paperplates (CAN), Poem, Poetry Salzburg Review (AUT), Transom, Writer’s Block (NED), and in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. His full-length collections include Salient Points and Sharp Angles (WordTech Editions), When the Spirit Moves Me (Wipf & Stock), Mother Mourning, The Ramifications (Wipf & Stock), Lovers’ Progress (Wipf & Stock), and Triple Muse (Wipf & Stock). All these collections are available on Amazon.