Watch Me Trick Ghosts by Robert Krut

Watch Me Trick Ghosts by Robert Krut is a delightfully strange book. Krut’s poems are full of stark and odd images but the sentiment beneath them is real. Good poetry can use shock and surprise to get into a readers’s brain and Krut’s work does this. His poems exist in the empty spaces of late city streets, imagined towns, unpeopled rooms. They’re urban sketch, nature, and home. They’re wonderful. Buy here.

From “Give Up”

. . . The same guy walks past

the house every night at midnight,

slumped shoulders and holding

the leash to an oblivious poodle,

that sweet dog strutting along despite

its anchor being

this breathing corpse who heads every night

to the corner convenience

to see if they have changed

their hours deeper into the night, despite

a handwritten note to the contrary. . .

From “The Anxious Lever of Lowering Sky”

Fear is a blade held in a lung.

The sky lowers an inch each night.

Play pin finger till dawn, you have ten.

Keep sticking your thumb in a socket.

Electrical or eye, it’s all the same . . .

From “The Furnace”

. . . I removed the painting to find a hole in the wall.

Copper wires humming a ghost harmony.

Your name was scratched into the picture frame.

I put the painting back.

The furnace inhaled its flames.

It went cold.

I walked out the door to no one.

I was on fire.