On Saturday, July 21, PEN American hosted poets Janaka Stucky and Ana Božičević at the second annual New York City Poetry Festival. Below, read Stucky’s poem “Move the Back of Your Heart Towards the Front of Your Heart,” from The World Will Deny It For You, out now on Ahsahta Press, and listen to a recording of him reading the poem at the festival.

Move the Back of Your Heart Towards the Front of Your Heart

We have become
White-blooded people of the future

Let me show you pictures of the man
I was when I was

Other than the man
I am right now

I have always wanted to be looked at
The way you look at me when I move

The back of my heart toward
The front of my heart

 

              The parenthesis of light
              Along your eye’s rim

Unbuttons me to the crescent shore of now
I break upon each time I land

At last

The solace of the world’s worst thing