Suzanne Manizza Roszak

Errands/Aberrance

There are objects one procures / for a female child. Ill-fitting shorts. / (The child has too narrow a waist.) / A stiff braided belt. (The child / likes brightly colored things.)

Tolkien from the library, / because book smarts are / desirable. I read in the dark, / with a flashlight, until / I am found out.

Improbably, a basketball. / (The child dribbles awkwardly, / walking the length of / the garage.)

I stay up past my mother’s / bedtime, crouched on the living / room rug. Before a television still / shaped like a box, watching / the Celtics lose.

Like it is possible to believe / in transference, like now / everything will change.

Suzanne Manizza Roszak‘s poetry has appeared in literary magazines including Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Poetry Northwest, and Third Coast. Her poetry collection Sicilianas won the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize from Bordighera Press and was first finalist for the North American Poetry Book Award. Suzanne’s book of lyric essays and hybrid writing titled Brutal Noises is forthcoming from Veliz Books. When she isn’t teaching creative writing at NYU Abu Dhabi, Suzanne lives in Groningen, the Netherlands.