Susana H. Case

Susana H. Case, professor at the New York Institute of Technology, is the author of the chapbooks The Scottish Café (Slapering Hol Press), Anthropologist In Ohio (Main Street Rag Publishing Company), The Cost Of Heat (Pecan Grove Press), and Manual of Practical Sexual Advice (Kattywompus Press). An English-Polish reprint of The Scottish Café, Kawiarnia Szkocka, was published by Opole University Press in Poland. Her book, Salem In Séance (WordTech Editions) will be released in 2013.

Everything Is Broken

Who doesn't feel the fractures
and rifts—

broken vocalizations—
Joyce Carol Oates wrote,
as if sandpaper could sing.

With a pickup group at Newport,
electric set,
outrage and booing
—Dylan's break from folk.

And my break from a husband.
People sleeping in broken beds.
No one else could repair me,
fated to remain a cryptically cracked
Humpty Dumpty.

Like the singer from Dinkytown,
there's clash and crash,
injury and fix.
The hound dog
howls and the bullfrog croaks;
it's the way they voice inevitability.