Diane Arbus, by Will Cordeiro

Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962, photograph by Diane Arbus (USA) 1962.

Diane Arbus
 
Your older brother was a famous poet;
but you’d rather wander New York with a Nikon
to snap the rejects and the misfits—seek an
ugly, unadorned, and frontal pose
 
to seize the awkward gawking of lost souls:
the sulking boy who claws his toy grenade,
his limbs like toothpicks and his face half crazed;
young twins in spite of their same formal clothes
 
who offer us two different looks—a moue,
a smirk; or men in curlers, circus freaks,
frail dwarfs: all with a sympathy which speaks
less to their grief than loneliness in you.
​
Will Cordeiro

Will Cordeiro has work appearing or forthcoming in Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Poetry Northwest, Sycamore Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. He co-edits the small press Eggtooth Editions. He is grateful for a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a scholarship from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a Truman Capote Writer’s Fellowship, as well as residencies from ART 342, Blue Mountain Center, Ora Lerman Trust, Petrified Forest National Park, and Risley Residential College. He received his MFA and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Will currently lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967, photograph by Diane Arbus (USA) 1967.