The Low Spark
their blind faith in the acoustic. Steel and cat gut whined for them, for us, in our time. The coke, smack, speedball, all the bad behaviors
rendered down into someone’s grandfather. Yeats said by the fire such beauty would be sadly recalled, penny-whistle wheezing to sleep
in the middle of the day. Insomniac, maybe, at midnight searching out warm milk and a magazine, through bifocals, through cataracts
they can read about themselves, the ones who survived. Plenty to see in Père Lachaise but they don’t travel to Paris much anymore
though they can reconvene anywhere, with no one older left to terrify.
Susan Gubernat’s second collection of poems, The Zoo at Night, won the Prairie Schooner book prize in poetry and was published in 2017 by the University of Nebraska Press. Her first book of poems, Flesh (Helicon Nine Editions), won the Marianne Moore Prize; and her chapbook, Analog House, was published by Finishing Line Press. Other poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gargoyle, Michigan Quarterly, The Pinch, Prairie Schooner, and Pleiades, among others. An opera librettist (Korczak’s Orphans; composer Adam Silverman), she is currently Professor Emerita of English at California State University, East Bay. Susan Gubernat received her MFA in poetry from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and has garnered numerous awards and fellowships, including artist’s grants from the states of New Jersey and New York, and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Millay Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.