Poem

Natalie Shapero

Side by side

Thirty Going

on seventeen, I come from hearty straw.
My grandpa wore a gallon
hat. My grandma, like a shogun,
bun and shawl. For their honeymoon,
they went to the movies. No one
knows what they saw.

You arrive with licorice, cigarettes,
the documentary on Woody Allen.
Don’t feign a passion for his start

in TV, or his clarinets,
or Love and Death. Just skip to the Soon-
Yi part.

Natalie Shapero

(United States of America, 1982)

Natalie Shapero is the author of two collections of poetry, Hard Child (2017) and No Object (2013). Publisher’s Weekly noted that “Shapero’s humor generally derives from dark places, as in her tendency toward self-deprecation.”