Nate Klug

Apr 19, 2024 | poets.org | Adrian Matejka |Deborah A. Miranda |Nate Klug |Didn’T Tilt

Find and share the perfect poems. Until around sundown, the survivinglilies in the yard stay wide open,like the window of a car passingon a hot day. No music from the flowers,but they smell like somebody’s fragrantsoap unwrapped on a dish edgedwith daisies. All those smells expressingthemselves haphazardly like a bandtrying to tune up.

Aug 7, 2023 | poetryfoundation.org | Nate Klug

Years ago, when I first learned what a flâneur is—that rapacious urban wanderer—I was struck by the thought that the female equivalent is not a fellow traveler, a gender-flipped idler whiling away her time in the streets, but something more constrictive—the “girl behind the counter,” to borrow Virginia Woolf’s phrase. She’s the shopgirl, the saleslady, the woman offering tickets or goods or information, always some kind of an exchange.