Katy Lederer
Katy Lederer was born in 1972 in Concord, New Hamphsire. Educated at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she edits the journal Explosive and serves as a Poetry Editor of Fence. Her poems and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Harvard Review, GQ, and elsewhere, and have been recognized with a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lederer is the author of the book of poems Winter Sex (Verse, 2002) and of the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crow 2003), which was included on Publishers Weekly’s list of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2003, named one of Esquire’s Best Books of the Year, and honored with a Discover Great New Writers citation from Barnes & Noble. She currently works for a quantitative trading firm and lives in New York City.
Sympathy and Envy
Until my friends abducted me
The world was a cubicle
The point where the passage runs east to west puzzles me
Your world
It is you and, it seems, through you
I see myself
To the south is a portent
An asking for work and a shower
A cubicle
Benched
Over the horizon is the greatest writer ever to have lived
He is not blind nor sure
He is nothing and has never written anything
We care about
As we do about ourselves
If we write
As the world will go
We’ll go
And we will
Pretend
In the presence
Of delinquency and parody
There are animals bursting and lacerated
By the strokes of bells
There are lashings of the soul, a trill
The movements of assassins and hunger
The world is formidable and proud
It is angry
The four points of laughter recede into heaven
We stand and listen
We know them we
Know ourselves
This advance should not now be the last
In our last breath the gleaming reminiscent teeth the scrotum
And disgust—it was rotund
It was extemporaneously pleasant
It was legal and menial
Our shoulders will leave us
Our voices will bleat
Help us the world is lost
Help us
We get what we want.
A Dream of Mimesis
It is duty and not hospitality that has diverted the ancient guest.
It is the whispered threat of sentiment and ignorance.
There is a plenitude of foresight. Before the diversion of the light.
The light is now spilling over. We now recognize him by his scar.
The feelings are being externalized. No contour is blurred, but of light
There is only the thin throat of it that hits his head. He rises—
Is seen through the curtains. Now lax—with the wind, made more solid. They are lying
Open. Their mouths are opening and closing, glistening
Slick in the yellow light. He is wanting to fuck.
The thigh is clean. The scar on the thigh is newly healed.
In the episode’s chaste entrée (“once…when a boar…”)—here—
He must straddle her ass. We are patient. Here, his organs begin to swell—
Lest they are spiritual, his courage will fail him. His organs are swelling—we have, here,
Great depths—trimmed by delicate vulvic folds. Flesh dangles, cut.
They talk. Her hand, fraught, grabs at his clean, polished cock.
Gradually, historically, the choice has befallen him. Idols aged rot on the verge
Of legend. It runs too smoothly. The river beside her. Angst. The river is blue.
The river is not very wide. He is raping her. The situation is complicated.
The scar on his thigh is newly healed. Let’s not see it just yet—let’s see
Both of their bodies illuminated in a uniform fashion. He slaps her. She grabs
At his ass. A suggestive influence of the unexpressed. The separation of styles.
Light hits her throat. The thighs of each swell—then abate. The sublime action dulls them.
He “persecutes” her. He is not afraid to let the realism of daily life enter into his
sublime.
There are clearly expressible reasons for their conflict. The human problem has
dealt with them
In this fashion. They are using two styles. The concept of his historical becoming
has disturbed him
Into action. The episodic nature of her pain is obscured by the sublime action of
his cock.
He is the simile of the wolf. He is seeking her nipples with his mouth (“A god
himself
Gave him…”). The introduction of episodes. An eloquent foreground. A uniform
present
Entirely foreign to the story of his scar (“The woman now touched it…”)
In Las Vegas
1.
When I write a novel in Vegas, I ask myself what other people will think.
When I write a novel, I think a lot about eating.
When I call my friend, he gets very excited.
Out of my window I see a huge mountain.
Its striations make it look as if the rain has fallen sideways on it. Over the years
I have danced a lot. I have thought to become a novelist.
I see a mountain that looks as if drenched by the rain. I see a sky
wherein clouds drift by slowly and unendingly.
Pistons go up and down. Pendulums swing back and forth.
If a person who is in love with me reads this, they will care.
If someone who hates me reads it, they will dismiss me as an imposter.
2.
Trees are like cairns. The yard is clean. The door is opened
to let in air. I have driven great distances and listened to a lot of music.
I read things that make me jealous. Alone.
I read about people I know. All women want to be beautiful.
3.
The pool’s light like moonlight.
The idea is to exercise caution and not give it up to them.
To say love and not be determined to show it then makes one a bastard.
To make proclamations as these are very pretty things to make
and to script them out and cause ugly havoc in the universe
we then must know. Over the hills there are lights.
Over the hills there are lights and this heat.
You have been the measure of all greatness.
It is pleasant of you in my mind to have been so.
You please god to love then if measuring greatness within me
found succubus to be fled, sent out, and adored.
Pray for me, I be less wholesome when trees sway.
Winds. Winds go these everywhich way.
4.
I like the sky. And I do not do
the opposite of what the trees do.
Interesting. I love you
is like sitting on a bench and you don’t
mean it when you say it.
Someone else has made you say it.