Icons: Rose Marie on The Dick Van Dyke Show, and: Reading Anna Karenina
- Icons: Rose Marie on The Dick Van Dyke Show, and: Reading Anna Karenina
Icons: Rose Marie on The Dick Van Dyke Show
Funny, the unique ladyhood of bows tuckedin a teased bob, black boat-neck dress, white glovesat the ready all while cracking wise as one toughIrish nun, it isn’t work it’s a blessingto pass the day in a Midtown high-rise holding your ownwith the boys, Morey’s cello whimpering every now and againabove the imagined traffic, planes from Queens suspendedover the cardboard skyline barely visible behind the half-open blinds,always leaving but never managing to be, finally, gone. [End Page 22]
Reading Anna Karenina
In middle age Tolstoy apprenticed himselfto a boot maker. He labored at learningthe skills of that trade. Sometimes his fingersbled onto the leather as he punched the awlor drew the needle in the outline of a foot.Blisters, he knew, are holier than ink stains.The boots were ugly and they pinched,Sonya complained, and she refused to wear them.Yet she copied Karenina by handhow many times? It was his words she loved,how he formed souls out of air. Just breath.She preferred the page’s purity to hisrestless hands. If he were a man made onlyof words she’d give her whole self to him. [End Page 23]
Karina Borowicz’s collection The Bees Are Waiting was selected by Franz Wright for the Marick Press Poetry Prize and has been named a Must-Read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry Northwest, and Columbia Poetry Review.
