Who and What We Are: poems by Ben Sloan. Number 3 in Volume Fourteen of our limited-edition Summer Kitchen Series.
Publication: August 12, 2026
Limited edition – only 49 copies
20 pages
$ 12.00
Ben Sloan holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College where he studied with John Ashbery and, for a year after graduating, worked as his secretary. Ben also has a PhD in American Literature from the CUNY Graduate Center. A Faculty Fellow in the Frank Friedman Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Piedmont Virginia Community College from August 2024 to May 2026, he has taught in prisons in both North Carolina and Virginia, and contributed in a support capacity to the March 11, 2026 Proximity for Justice TEDx event at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women. Having released two previous poetry collections, The Road Home (Thirty West Publishing House, 2017) and Then On Out Into a Cloudless Sky (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023), Ben currently resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Monday and Tuesday
1.
Monday a nurse uses a turkey baster
to feed a pink paste to my father,
pillows packed in all around him
so he won’t fall. Resembling a sultan
in the last days of his reign, he is eighty
and dying. Birdlike, she leans in,
pries between his lips, and to his credit
he cooperates, as best he can,
his eyes two fogged-over windows.
As she steps back, he spits it all out.
2.
Shuffling in and out of crowded rooms,
as well as the ones we occupy alone
searching for the right question
to ask ourselves, we end by exiting
through an obscure back door
built into the very architecture
of who and what we are.
Always open and always closed,
where does it lead?
Beyond a forest, to a boat on the coast.
3.
Arriving at the hospital at noon on Tuesday,
my sister asks, How is he? at which point
our mother, her face a tightly clenched fist,
comes out from where she has been hiding
from herself for the previous nine hours.
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