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Summer  2009

J.T. Barbarese is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Black Beach (University of North Texas Press, 2005), and a translation of Euripides' Children of Herakles. His poems, variously anthologized, have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Boulevard, Poetry Northwest,  Poetry, and The Times Literary Supplement, and his translations of  Prévert have been published in The Denver Quarterly and Boulevard. He has published literary journalism in Tri-Quarterly, The Sewanee Review, Studies in English Literature, The Journal of Modern Literature, and The Columbia History of American Poetry (1999). He is the editor of Story Quarterly, now housed at Rutgers University's Campus at Camden, New Jersey.

• Click here to view the C.V. of J.T. Barbarese

Woke with a head cold today.
But enough about me.

The fields were wet,
the moms out of their make-up,

the dads in head-bowed, serious groups
our beautiful kids, in battle.

One by one the jets moved single-file
as if down a cattle chute, west to east,

and we’d steal a glance at them
and turn back to our beautiful children

then turn away and look at our feet,
growing shadows. How hollow grief seems

when it comes in multiples.
Three times the whistle blew

and our grief wandered back to us,
in groups, cheeks ablaze.

As we left the field
our shadows were all one length.