Two poems by Adam Gianforcaro

Abecedarian as Ars Poetica

Already this feels too much. The way a line can

break anywhere. Here even, if we aren’t

careful. Too often I’m caught off guard, having

dropped suddenly from the place I was standing, like an

elevator with its cable cut, like another word

falling down the stairs. Do you remember when

God was a sonnet you could stumble into, or

how enlightenment was the volta neither of us was prepared for?

I nearly fell off the page taking that turn, and in fact,

just recovered from the neck injury I endured from it. Don’t

kill the messenger, my spine doc once said, because speakers have

little control over where anything in the poem goes.

Men behind the curtain are to blame, pulling levers and twisting screw-

nuts instead of editing out screwy words like screw-nut.

O, how I would kill to be the poet laureate of machinery so I could

ponder something useful for once (lately I can’t stop thinking how

quatrains are the poetic version of the nuclear family).

Really, what a silly little market this is, writing

silly little poems about gravity and grief or the forty-

two tons of tangerines the world produces each year. How

unguarded poets become among citrus trees. What other

vocation can place its hands at your throat and choke you out

with wind alone? What other business can flourish by taking away and

X-ing things out? Speaking of Xs, pull out your map. If you head

yonder, just past the next line, you’ll reach the demilitarized

zone where, like magic, the poem never has to end, but instead—

Vacation Story

At 156 feet in height, the Giant Wheel provides the best views of the island. Roller coasters look like ant hills. The ocean, a baby pool. —Morey’s Pier website

Atop the apex of a Wild-

wood Ferris wheel, my mother

covers me with her body,

the metallic taste of prayer

trapped inside her saltwater.

Between thunderclaps

a kid-worker yells toward

the heavens, toward us.

Says: he can’t—

that the only option

is to wait out the storm.

Says: he’s sorry—

but his voice is taken

elsewhere by the rattling wind

and farawayness of safety.

I still don’t know

if the science holds up:

that motion could have drawn

the lightning toward us.

Who am I to say

what one should or can

be drawn toward?

Last week, I was drawn

obsessively toward a line

by Ross Gay: who

knows where the poem

will lead you. That summer

those lines had yet

to be written and yet

was a truth I had

already known.

In stillness, in storm,

we are helpless to motion,

to whatever wildness

the poem wants to usher

us toward.

Prayers became pleas

became our silent

sopping bodies

piled on the gondola floor,

swaying, swaying.

And so the only way free

was to see where the poem

would lead us. One by one

we monkeyed down

to the puddled earth and ran

straight for the enormous ocean.

Adam Gianforcaro is the author of the chapbook Poems to Stage Dive to (Stanchion Books, 2026) and full-length collection Every Living Day (Thirty West, 2023). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his work can be found in The Offing, The Harvard Advocate, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.