Matthew Zapruder

POEM IN YOUR POCKET

Hey Jack put me in your pocket
so I can be by the blue above
all those ungrateful heads
somewhat darkly bereaved.
The sky once thought
it knew me and never will.
Please feel not quite
sorry enough to take me
out in the sun. Leave
me here where I can’t touch
the shoulders of tourists
shopping for apples. You’ll just
have to lean down and listen
to me tell my reliquary
what it almost felt like to be
a breeze. Listen. Then you can
tell everyone you’ve heard
a poem in the world.



Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon, 2010) and Sun Bear (Copper Canyon, 2014), as well as Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017), a book of prose. An associate professor in the MFA at Saint Mary’s College of California, he is also editor at large at Wave Books. He lives in Oakland, California. “Poem in Your Pocket” was written for a librarian who requested a short poem he could carry around on Poem in Your Pocket Day, April 26. On this day, Americans are instructed to “select a poem, carry it with you, and share it with others at schools, bookstores, libraries, parks, workplaces, street corners, and on social media using the hashtag #pocketpoem.”