Andrew Kozma
Poetry
Andrew Kozma’s poems have appeared in Blackbird, The Believer, Redactions, and Bennington Review. His first book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award.
Transplant
When my dad died, I felt nothing. Both the null and the void.
An absence so clear-cut, I couldn’t remember a presence.
There was nothing there. Nothing was right there. Tears arrived
for the rest, hand delivered. Signed for them. Signed off on them.
I blamed distance, the body I never saw, but the earth
of his ashes follows wherever I go. A coffin I can’t escape.
The moment he died, I thought I felt it. I was hours off.
His heart was dead, a transplant in its place. The mourning crowd
keens in another closed room, behind another door, a different face.
“ My dad died right when I started my MFA program, and most of the poems from then circled around him. This was written fourteen years later but is still tied to that moment. Much of my writing is about failed understanding, often between different people or cultures. In this case, it’s the failure of the mind to understand its own grief. ”
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