Definition of Stranger
Definition of Stranger
By Idra Novey
Person not a member
of a group. A visitor,
guest, or the breast
that brushes your arm
on the subway. Person
with whom you've had
no acquaintance but who's taken
your rocking chair
from the curbside
and curls up in it
and closes her eyes.
Person in line
behind you now, waiting
for a glass of water,
or of whiskey, of elixir.
Person logging online
at the same second
from the Home Depot in
Or in search of the Dalai Lama.
Person not privy or party
to a decision, edict, et cetera,
but who's eaten
from the same fork
at the pizzeria
and kissed your wilder sister
on New Year's. Person assigned
to feed the tiger at the zoo
where you slipped your hand
**********************once
into the palm
of somebody else's father.
Idra Novey's first collection of poems, The Next Country was released in fall 2008. She's received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Series, and the PEN Translation Fund. Her poems have appeared in Slate, Paris Review, A Public Space, Ploughshares, and in the anthology Poem in Your Pocket, forthcoming this April. In 2007, a book of her translations of Brazilian poet Paulo Henriques Britto, The Clean Shirt of It, was published with BOA Editions. Her translations and reviews appear in a number of publications, including BOMB, The Jerusalem Post, and The Believer.
