Andrea Cohen
Sometimes you’ve got, he
said, to swallow the bullet.
I guess you do that
when you’re out of bitter
pills, when you’re under
enemy fire, without benefit
of anesthesia, when the bullet
you’ve been biting could
be used against you.
Andrea Cohen’s most recent poetry collection is Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry). She directs The Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.
“The first front porch that mattered to me was on a cobblestone street in Iowa City, where I lived with three fabulous writers, women who favored beautiful, clackety, manual typewriters—Underwoods and Royals and Remingtons—and who typed all seasons on that porch. The front porch across the street was always empty, the shades on its wide windows always drawn. More than a few poems and stories imagined what might have been happening behind those shades.
Where I live now has a traditional sort of Victorian front porch, which I love, though mostly I sit on the porch steps. It’s a sort of in-between place, and sitting there gives me a fighting chance of intercepting our hounds, Daisy and Beckett, who like to lounge on the porch proper until their favorite prey—a passing tabby or thundering UPS truck—causes them to bolt, baying, toward the street.”