25 August 2007 | Vol. 7, No. 2
Craft-Class Ghazal
Electric guitar is run over by a car on the highway.
–David Byrne
The teacher's assignment: Stop making sense.
No problem; all along, we've only been half-baking sense.
I play with my GI Joes and watch Captain Scarlet in B&W;
from the kitchen, a whiff of Mom's cup-caking scents.
We'd visit my brother Freddie at Willowbrook State School.
He's labeled retarded; the rest of us are faking sense.
They call rulings on sodomy and gay marriage seismic shifts;
to me, fucking & marrying my boyfriend makes earth-quaking sense.
Eighty-seven point five billion for "nation building" in Iraq;
Here, wet backs scamper for green backs, frantically raking cents.
I invent new periphrases for "comings" and "goings,"
like "givings hither" and "takings hence"—
with middling success. But Michael achieves what he sought:
a kind of dreamlike, rather than waking sense.
About the author:
Michael Broder received his MFA from the Creative Writing Program at New York University in 2005. His work has appeared in BLOOM, Brooklyn Review, Caffeine Destiny, Capilano Review, H_NGM_N, La Petite Zine, Painted Bride Quarterly, roger, Softblow, Unpleasant Event Schedule, and Word for/ Word, as well as in the anthology This New Breed. He is working on a doctorate in classical studies at the City University of New York and teaches in the classics department at Brooklyn College.
For further reading:
See the complete list of work by Michael Broder at 42opus. Browse the contents of 42opus Vol. 7, No. 2, where "Craft-Class Ghazal" ran on August 25, 2007. List other work with these same labels: poetry, ghazal.
