

Sometimes high fashion works a complicated trick on money and nobody walks away happy. There’s a tiresomeness to it, to the always-producing.
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The last afternoon you felt truly free getting a parking ticket on its windshield. I have dreamed of you holding a cold stethoscope / to my chest. I sit inside and copy everything from one scroll to another. Every daydream a color for bread not to feed. He tweets and posts work occasionally at. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Blackbox Manifold, Jerkpoet, Maudlin House, Eunoia Review, Third Point Press, and elsewhere. Tom Snarsky teaches mathematics at Malden High School in Malden, Massachusetts, USA. It is merely an attempt (and here the borrowings begin with a phrase from Fanny Howe) “to see and to be” in the world through the inimitable apparatus of the long poem. As a poem, it is neither conceptual nor alone. Many of the lines are stolen, borrowed, reordered, or rearranged from divers sources, living and dead. Rather, Centurion’s constituent parts coalesce in the loose faith of spokenness – the hope that even their incomplete, fractured music might somehow enact a healing.Ĭenturion is part cento, part collage, and part conversation.

Neither are the sentences and fragments of the poem constructed into hierarchies, like the centurion’s domestic “roof” (which covers servitude) or the militaristic order of his profession. The images, words, and ideas that make up the poem are not audacious enough to flesh themselves out fully from within their confinement – rigid units of ten pseudo-paragraphs each. The centurion replies to Jesus’s offer with what has come to be known as the Centurion’s Prayer, which reads (in the Douay-Rheims translation): “Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst enter under my roof: but only say the word, and my servant shall be healed.” After Jesus’s reply, which lauds the centurion’s extraordinary faith, the servant is returned to health.Ĭenturion takes as its starting point the extremes of power at work in this story. The centurion tells Jesus about his servant’s agony, and Jesus offers to come into the centurion’s house to heal the servant. In the story, the centurion has a servant who is bedridden in the centurion’s house the servant is paralyzed and in great pain. There is a famous story in the Christian gospels about a centurion from the fishing village of Capernaum. A centurion was a Roman army officer who commanded a group of men called a centuria, or “century.”
