Robert Pinsky: ‘Previous Information’

Hearken to extra tales on hark

Discover the June 2025 Problem

Try extra from this problem and discover your subsequent story to learn.

I’m extra at residence in The Previous, need although I could
To dwell on this lonesome place The Current Second.

I share a stack of magazines with somebody
Who reads the brand new ones from the highest. The underside,

Salted with gilded ephemera, outspent advertisements
And failing or light fads, is simply my meat.

Praying that I don’t blind myself to horrors
I examine the Occasions on-line to behold the face

Of fascism and its disregarding hand.
I carry on serious about it as I retreat

To scan a house display of my highschool class,
Our posted shades of mortal veils and marrows.

The dialog floats down tunnels of fortune
To the ninth grade, Joe Cittadino expelled

For setting a hearth within the Chattle Constructing attic.
Joe died some time in the past, did folks comprehend it?

As an alternative of hiding as at all times earlier than in silent
Anonymity, I enable myself the homely

Civic pleasure of getting one thing to say,
Posting: Joe instructed me again then it wasn’t him,

He took the blame to impress a woman, her brother
Was Frankie Quinn who actually set the fireplace.

And thanks, Junior Genovese, for writing:
You might be proper Robert, it was Frankie Quinn.

This poem seems within the June 2025 print version.