https://www.albany.edu/offcourse
http://offcourse.org
ISSN 1556-4975
Published by Ricardo and Isabel Nirenberg since 1998
She thought it had something
To do with Freud.
Granted it did,
Does that make
The music “too intellectual?”
You would have to ask a sitting
Or hanging judge.
Marcus Aurelius was a bit neurotic
In the Meditations; periodically correcting himself
In a hysterical manner (granted it was supposedly
Only written for himself).
Seriously, it would be interesting to stage,
But right now, everything is out of season,
Especially the fruit.
I am sitting in a room, he said,
On Memorex (if you remember that).
It had the “necessary whiff of the fraudulent”
Presumably, perhaps.
"Why do you sit there looking
like an envelope without
Any address on it?”
“Doesn’t ‘whiskey’ sound
So much more colorful than ‘booze,’” he asked,
In an innocent tone.
Is this too many questions?
And to hell with the Jive Authority.
“Have you seen my servant Job?”
We’ve got a timeline, anyway,
Even when to consider the Karaoke machine
In the scale of the heist.
And sincerity has nothing to do
With joining the search party.
A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.
Ian Ganassi’s work has appeared recently or will appear soon in journals, such as New American Writing, Survision, Home Planet News, and The Yale Review, among many others. His first full length collection, Mean Numbers (Isolibris/China Grove Press, 2016), as well as his second collection (recently released), True for the Moment (David Robert Books, 2023), are available online in the usual places. A third collection, By This Time (Finishing Line Press, 2024), has just been published as of June of this year. Selections from an ongoing collaboration with a painter can be found at https://www.thecorpses.com/. Ganassi is a longtime resident of New Haven, Connecticut.