“The Faucet” by J. Kates

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Bigger Than They Appear

I am not so easily turned off.
All night the hot syllable of my name
will tap at irregular intervals
onto the cold and ringing porcelain
of your most private room.

Twist until the clean metal
burns bruises into your sleepless hand.
I have found a way
to keep the water running
one tear at a time.

–J. Kates,
Metes and Bounds
Accents Publishing

More from Metes and Bounds and J. Kates:

J. KatesJ. Kates is a poet, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry in 1984 and a Translation Project Fellowship in 2006, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts in 1995. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of three books of Latin American poetry, and has a chapbook of his own poems, Mappemonde (Oyster River).

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