Winner of the
2009 James Laughlin Award
of the Academy of American Poets
Selected for inclusion in
The Pushcart Prize XXXV:
Best of the Small Presses
98 pages, $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-9794582-2-4
© 2009
How to Live on Bread and Music
by Jennifer K. Sweeney
Nocturne
There is a blue city in mind
constructed slantways
along a rippling canal,
clean and unpeopled but for a musician
who plays a harp without strings.
The city has one chair
where he sits by the broad strokes of water.
A lone streetlamp casts
a blue arc of light.
A Persian door. A zeppelin sky.
The world filters through
his empty frame as he plucks the air.
Maybe you hear a song or maybe you don't.
That is the choice we are always making.