Spy Poetry - Chestertown Spy

Editor’s Note: This is the poem that happens when you’re a poor young writer subsisting paycheck to paycheck and someone gives you an outlet for your creativity. What poem would have arisen, I wonder, if he had worked at a waffle iron manufacturer? DL

Tester by Edgar Kunz

I catch a bus out to the county
and check in at a beige terminal

and they ask me about the smells
and textures of various dips

and I click appealing
or not appealing, then elaborate

in the text box below. Artichoke
and French Onion. Spicy Three

Bean Queso. I got in
on referral. I live with seven

other people. I measure rent
in how many sessions I have to do

with the dips. I start testing
what I can get away with: notes

of bright espresso, mouthfeel
of a sun-ripe plum.

I write longer and longer.
I don’t think they read a word.

It’s weeks before you’re entered
into the system, more weeks

to get your tiny check. Aline says
If you think it’s a scam

why do you keep saying yes?
In the fluorescent room I receive

one dip after another from blue
gloved hands, always the same

plain tortilla chips to dip with,
the same hands clearing away

the tiny plastic cups. I tinker
with my descriptions. If I need

water, they bring me water
in slightly larger cups.

Edgar Kunz has been an NEA Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Poetry, the American Poetry Review and the Oxford American. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College. His poem “Tester” is included in his second book, Fixer (Copyright© 2023 by Edgar Kunz). Posted here with author’s permission and courtesy of Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers.

Editor’s Note: How carefully and lovingly this room in Antwerp is observed—how the light plays on the walls and dust settles over everything, much the way time sifts silently down over our lives, dimming the past and the lovers we left there.

Room in Antwerp by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Dust covers the window, but light slips through—
it always does—through dust or cracks or under doors.

Every day at dusk, the sun, through branches,
hits a river’s bend & sends silver slivers to the walls.

No one’s there to see this. No one.
But it dances there anyway, that light,

& when the wind weaves waves into the water
it’s as if lit syllables quivered on the bricks.

xxxThen the sun sinks, swallowed by the dark. In that dark
more dust, always more dust
xxxxxxxxxxxxxsettles—sighs over everything.

There is no silence there, something always stirs
not far away. Small rags of noise.

Rilke said most people will know only a small corner of their room.

I read this long ago & still don’t know how to understand
that word only, do you?

Where are you? I think of you so often
& search for you in every face that comes between me & dust,
me & dusk—first love, torn corner from this life.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar was born in 1943. She grew up in Belgium and moved to the United States in 1987. Fluent in four languages, she has published poems in French and Flemish and translates American poetry into French and Dutch poetry into English. She is the author of These Many Rooms (Four Way Books, 2019); A New Hunger (Ausable Press, 2007); Small Gods of Grief (BOA Editions, 2001), which won the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry; and The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (BOA Editions, 1997). As an anthologist, Bosselaar edited Never Before: Poems About First Experiences (Four Way Books, 2004); Outsiders, Poems About Rebels, Exiles and Renegades (Milkweed Editions, 1999), and Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City (Milkweed Editions, 2000). She coedited, with Kurt Brown, Night Out: Poems about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants and Bars (Milkweed Editions, 1997). This poem was included in LATELY: New and Selected Poems from Sungold Press (2004) and is posted here with the author’s permission.

Spy Poetry: Tester by Edgar Kunz

Spy Poetry: Room in Antwerp by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

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