Recovery Mission
Rent from DeepDyve- Recovery Mission
Homeless alien: paper-bag helmet, goggles, fisherman's waders below a blue flannel shirt no one would dare to wear in August. Gloves streaked in mower fluid. Insecticide. Fly swatter
poised as he fumigated the bored hole. We heard only the repetitive whap as dazed, nearly immobilized, writhing wasps emerged to be smacked and snapped, our concrete porch
pocked with cracked abdomens, stingers, thoraxes. Then another hive's-worth descended not on my father but on the dead, lifting remains into the sky, the woods. When he stripped down
to shorts, bare-chested, he looked lost. I asked if he was okay, if he'd been stung, and he said he smelled honeysuckle from someone's yard, very far away.
Sascha Feinstein won the Hayden Carruth Award for his poetry collection Misterioso. He has published two critical books, Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present and, as coeditor with Yusef Komunyakaa, The Jazz Poetry Anthology and its companion volume, The Second Set. His next book, Ask Me Now: Conversations on Jazz & Literature, will be published later in the year by Indiana University Press. He codirects the creative writing program at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and edits Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature, which he founded ten years ago.
