The Poetry of Ian Ganassi

And They Make It Sound So Easy

I’d rather gather ‘round the campfire,
Join the campfire girls.

They make great cheese.

And that’s the way I like to peel my onions.

The great man is he who digs
Into the right stuff at the right time.

Life kills us in the end,
No matter where you dig.

All its little accidental and accentual broken ideas of boredom,
The unintended repetitions, chimes, misprints, odd typography,
The enraging and engorging failures
Of systems and otherwise . . .

Put on your lineman boots and go climb a pole.

It was an armature, but a friendly sort of armature.

The big striped larvae eating through the Styrofoam
Were quite disgusting.

Under construction, with thick glasses.

Something about “Coke bottle glasses?”
I’m not sure.

Where am I supposed to be, and when?
And with whom?

“Stare up into the light,” she said.
“Your hair has become very white,” I said

The signs were lit for 12:30 p.m.,
But by then it was obsessive-compulsive,

In excess. Wake up, they shouted, in my ear.

Beats your threatening demons,

Your resident monsters,

But not decisively.

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6/27/2024

Ian Ganassi’s work has appeared recently or will appear soon in journals, such as New American Writing, Survision, Home Planet News, and The Yale Review, among many others. His first full length collection, Mean Numbers (Isolibris/China Grove Press, 2016), as well as his second collection (recently released), True for the Moment (David Robert Books, 2023), are available online in the usual places. A third collection, By This Time (Finishing Line Press, 2024), has just been published as of June of this year. Selections from an ongoing collaboration with a painter can be found at https://www.thecorpses.com/. Ganassi is a longtime resident of New Haven, Connecticut.