Joel Katz
Joel Katz has worked in Silicon Valley as a business software specialist. His poems have appeared in various literary journals, including Sand Hill Review, The Montserrat Review, West Wind Review, Disquieting Muses Quarterly, Spillway and Red Wheelbarrow. His chapbook Away was published by Mayapple Press in 2008. Together with colleague Robert Perry, Joel has translated poems by the contemporary Dutch poets Ingmar Heytze and Saskia Stehouwer in the bilingual book iets anders | something else (Dutch Poet Press, July 2017). A translated volume of Saskia Stehouwer’s recent ecopoetry volume Free-rangewill be published in April 2019 (Dutch Poet Press).
We set out in the boat
We set out in the boat
to bring back something
to eat or at least a story
but the waves yielded neither
so we brought back the wind
which was tasty and full of suspense
For a New Year
We needed a new kind of Bible not so much a testament as a ball of
twine to be unraveled opened something linear yet undirected something
beyond a ring-tone and finger-swipe to focus our attention something as
vaporous as a cloud yet casting a shadow on the very ground we walk on
while we consider how many haircuts it takes to feather a pillow or how
the storm drain at the corner of Putz and Montana in Cincinnati is the final
resting-place for misplaced car keys how it’s a portal for errant raccoons
how during autumn rains its grillwork resembles a coffee filter soggy&rank
with leaves how at that corner with no school crossing-guard the storm drain
is an arbiter of flow is this where the twine will lead us and will we find
something to believe in