ALEX STIBER

Alex Stiber, born and reared in NYC; currently living in Pittsburgh; poems and short fiction published previously in MAG as well as in Greensboro Review, Event, Fiddlehead, Poem, Chaffin Journal, The American Voice, Wind, Louisville Review, Paragraph, eleven, stone country, and many others defunct or barely hanging on; book, Lost & Found: The Story of How One Man Discovered the Secrets of Leadership Where He Wasn't Even Looking (Random House/Crown, Feb. 2004). www.alexstiber.com

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I'M NOT DEPRESSED

I may feel like crying,
& actually break down,
when I read a story,

like the one in today's Times,
about the Holocaust survivor
who met her brother in Israel

for the first time in over 60 years
after being separated by
a disintegrating family and Nazis,

& I look at the photo of the older brother,
who'd fled to Russia to fight the Germans,
kissing her tattoo, & I wish I could find

one person who collaborated
in that atrocity & spend the day
torturing him in ways I don't

even want to begin to imagine. If I were
depressed, I think I'd find all this
just too hard to talk about.

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ALL I NEED

--for Allan McGuffey

The muffled patter
of an outdoor shower
ending
at the next door
neighbor's house
where the olive
skinned woman I've
never met steps out,
wrapped in a towel
like a hastily gotten gift,
turns her green eyes
toward my yard
and pictures herself
lying down with me
in a hammock, under the
last Dutch elm on our block,
breathing in the scent
of the rosemary
and basil growing so
abundantly around the heart
of my garden,
the two of us, silent,
rocking away the afternoon.