NATURALISM
by KATHY FAGAN
Into her chest sash he chiseled
Michelangelo Buonarroti made this
and lived long enough to regret it,
his pride and long life both.
And though he made her young,
strong, large enough to cradle
the weight of a dead man, her
six sorrows shine in the marble,
Virgin Mother, daughter of her son.
In 1964 we rolled past
on a conveyor belt to see it, the Pietà,
shipped to New York, packed to float,
emergency locator and buoy attached.
There, at the World’s Fair, the future
dangling like a stringer of bright fish,
Golgotha and Rome meant nothing
to me yet, the dead dead and the living
living, chipping away—long
line of losses ahead, then behind—
you have your sorrows, too. Essential
to Renaissance artists was making
a figure true to life. The bodies I knew
were plenty lifelike, just not ideal.
Michelangelo, nursed by a stonecutter’s
wife, worked stone a little every day
until his death at 88, the figure emerging
rough comfort, neither dead nor alive,
left as unfinished as the rest of us.
THE DISTANCING EFFECT
by KATHY FAGAN
“The shark has teeth
It wears on its face.
Macheath wields his knife
Without leaving a trace.”
THE THREEPENNY OPERA,
BRECHT AND WEILL, 1928
The Xmas tree on the TV
console was built
out of toothpicks and Styrofoam
balls, assembled into a conical shape
and flocked.
Not pictured,
the mother
responsible for the holiday
décor, for the kids and their outfits,
their haircuts, the meal that awaited them, the Xmas
carols. She might have snuck
in “Mack the Knife,”
Bobby Darin’s
version, with no
fewer than five key changes
and lyrics that make sense only if you know
German Marxist musicals of the 1920s, or what Bobby
Darin looked like. There was a cold
war on. The House
Un-American Activities Committee hearings ran on
TV, the Red
threat sold like corn flakes. You could pick
a lot of teeth
with that Xmas tree but not a single lock.
A child
of immigrant laborers, she loved
to paint and read early on. She didn’t know
about Macheath, his knife,
collusions with cop, crown, politician. Her husband
mostly paid the mortgage on time.
The past was
as far away as the future.
She loved Bobby
Darin. The children’s father’s name was Bobby.
They heard her say the name
so often, they called her
bobby pins
daddy pins for years.
They thought it was a song about a shark.
author pic here
Kathy Fagan ’s newest collection, The Unbecoming (W.W. Norton, September 2026), is available for preorder now. Her sixth book, winner of Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Poetry Prize, is Bad Hobby (Milkweed Editions, 2022), available in print and audio. Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award. Fagan is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, former NEA recipient, and longtime educator. You can find her in her poems, at her website, and in a tiny olive grove in Tuscany.
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