Demonym for the Exurbs of Infatuation

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This photograph shows multiple pigeons sitting on a green pole. — Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Eventually, the pigeons lacerated
               the smog cover into an alphabet.

And so I listed to the best of my ability
               all the collective nouns for birds I knew:
murder to unkindness.

Snipping circles around the outer regions 
               of your whats

like only a Berliner can,
               you clipped a smattering
of syllables from your vocabulary’s newsprint.

               I watched them murmurate 
like pepper in an oiled pan
               or a flurry of box-elder whirligigs

at the very first unseasonable
               gust from the suddenly weird, 
unspannable distance of a public clearing.

               Sure, it’s a bad, pestiferous world, 
but at its farthest edges

the light is sometimes ardent and indistinct: 
               either a low-country valley or
the small of a back.

               Meet me there. I’ll bring a bottle and a grin 
as bright as definition.

George Kovalenko

is a Lecturer in the Department of English at Stony Brook University. His research encompasses European and American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, Critical Theory, Marxism, continental philosophy (esp. German idealism and its afterlives), and historical poetics. Articles of his have appeared in New German Critique, Poetics Today, and The Wallace Stevens Journal. He is editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Marxist Literary Theory (under contract, Cambridge University Press) and co-editor of the volumes The Frankfurt School and Poetics (under contract, Routledge) and Hildegarde Flanner: On the Life and Work of an American Master (under contract, The Unsung Masters Series). His work has received financial support from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Leo Baeck Institute, the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at the University of Southern California, and he has held visiting scholarships with New York University’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University. His poetry and translations have appeared in such venues as The American Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Oxford Poetry, and The Southern Review. He holds an M.F.A. from NYU and a Ph.D. from the University of Denver, where he served as Poetry and Translations Editor for Denver Quarterly. He lives in New York City.

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