The Haircut

Judy Katz

And just like that,
with one haircut,
my husband became
his father.I could see his skull
through the thinning salt
and pepper of his hair,
his father’s skull.And the bemused smile
that seemed to replace
his own,
his father’s smile.And it occurred to me
that eventually
I would be married
to his father—a thought
that sent a shock wave
through the whole
thought communitywhich held
its collective breath for a moment,
as a theater audience might,
waiting to seehow the clever
but trapped protagonist
would escape by a hair
this time.

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Judy Katz’s work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Women’s Review of Books, Salamander, Bellevue Literary Review, upstreet and other online and print journals. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and have been included in Best Indie Lit New England, Vol. 1 and The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review.

Hanging Loose

109

Brooklyn, New York

Editors: Robert Hershon, Dick Lourie, Mark Pawlak, Ron Schreiber (1934-2004)
Associate Editors: Donna Brook, Marie Carter

The first issue of Hanging Loose magazine was published in 1966. The name was inspired by the format — mimeographed loose pages in a cover envelope — and that, in turn, was inspired by a very low budget. But the format was also meant to get across a point of view: that poetry is for now, not for the Ages. If you liked a poem, you could pin it to the wall. If you didn’t like a poem, you could use it as a napkin.

The editors are proud of having published many first books, including the first full collections by Sherman Alexie, Kimiko Hahn, D. Nurkse, Jack Agüeros, Elinor Nauen, Joanna Fuhrman, Maggie Nelson, Indran Amirthanayagam, and Beth Bosworth, among others. Some of the other writers published by HL are Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, Frances Phillips, Harvey Shapiro, Jayne Cortez, Ron Overton, Helen Adam, Paul Violi, Charles North, Ha Jin, Morton Marcus, Maureen Owen, Donna Brook, Yukihide Hartman, Jack Anderson and Ed Friedman.

In this issue: Jack Anderson, Carole Bernstein, Jiwon Choi, Gerald Fleming, Caroline Knox, Pablo Medina, Dan O’Brien, Mark Pawlak, Tim Robbins, Mather Schneider, Wang Ping, and many more.

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