Grant Schutzman

[We live in the cemetery]

We live in the cemetery
the center of the city
and we watch the morning
strike itself against the graves
the stones are the same color
as the sky and the paths between them
are like playground slides
the branches of trees make arms that reach
for windows on tall buildings
the day is but a sleepy relic of the night
what I mean is that this body beneath
the earth breathes just as a sun would
a light that you only notice
at its end.

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Grant Schutzman is a poet and translator. He is fascinated by multilingual writing and that which has been deemed the untranslatable. His poetry and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Rust + Moth, The Inflectionist Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, Ezra, Exchanges and Your Impossible Voice.