Liston-Patterson fight, Chicago Tribune, September 25, 1962

By Lucian Staiano-Daniels.

◊

Chicago Tribune September 26, 1962 sonny liston

looms out of greasy ink
like the whole keyboard pressed at once
god created the golem
but he did not tell
you where to keep it

•

nude descending

i never fixed my gaze
never gazed at any boy
gaze upon
boy who more desires
stutter to movement start
to spring to you

•

combat is a huge woman

she presses her knees
toes into the giving earth
her shoulders
shift the lid of heaven
about me combat cups her boat sized hand

•

and froze

a great gelid poured over us
the hard white
the iron white
the entire world, which is that square of glass
its brittle joists

•

the correct number

the thingness of things
scoured panes cupped in skim milk light
and great silence
under the sill a green stone
where i had written green stone

♦

LUCIAN STAIANO-DANIELS is a historian of violent conflict in early-modern Europe, and he is a poet. After his initial education at St. John’s College and NYU, he received a PhD in social and microhistory from UCLA and is now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His poetry has appeared in Frogpond, The Collidescope, and The Exacting Clam. His first historical book, The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.