Galvanic Response

Judith Kerman

The Assistant V.P.
Imagines Herself
As a Butcher

In her business
blood is a commodity.
Beef sides dangle in the cooler;
knives and cleavers gleam.
Chuck. Rump. Sirloin.
When customers come in, the bell
tinkles over the door.

The smell of blood is neighborly:
two chops, a pound of ground round.
Her hands caress a shoulder of lamb,
sweetbreads, the clean strings of sausages.
She wraps filets in crisp brown paper.
A yellow cat wolfs his liver scraps
and sits down to wash in a sunny window.

It’s cold work;
sometimes her hands ache.
At night she dreams
she is walking down a sidewalk
with the black-grey sheen of steel.
Dried hands dangle in shopwindows.
She’s hungry.

isbn 1-59661-024-7
31 pages/$9

These spare poems are like finely wrought Japanese paintings, their quick brushstrokes capturing fleeting and extraordinary moments in life. It is a pleasure to travel with this poet, to discover her eccentricities, to see how she translates what she observes, to gain new insights into the complexities of the imagination.
—Judith Minty

These lean poems…respect their details—”the white sausages,/tasty but slightly obscene,/the white asparagus/picked before the sun got to it.” But their most rewarding surprises lurk in their juxtapositions, their metaphors…the unfindable mystery,…explored with appropriate reverence as the speaker takes apart her vacuum cleaner. Be prepared for new connections.
—Conrad Hilberry

Judith Kerman has published seven books of poetry, most recently Plane Surfaces/Plano de Incidencia, as well as A Woman in Her Garden: Selected Poems of Dulce María Loynaz (translations). She founded Earth’s Daughters Magazine and runs Mayapple Press. She was a Fulbright Senior Scholar to the Dominican Republic in 2002.