THE COMMITTEE WEIGHS IN
By Andrea Cohen

I tell my mother
I’ve won the Nobel Prize.

Again? she says. Which
discipline this time?

It’s a little game
we play: I pretend

I’m somebody, she
pretends she isn’t dead.

(Today’s poem originally appeared in The Threepenny Review and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Andrea Cohen writes and swims in Watertown, MA. Her heroes have swum Venetian canals, the Chattahoochee, and The English Channel. Her poems and stories have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, Memorious and elsewhere. Her fourth poetry collection, Furs Not Mine, will be published by Four Way Books.

Other collections include Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry 2011), Long Division (Salmon Poetry 2009), and The Cartographer’s Vacation (Owl Creek Press 1999). She has received a PEN Discovery Award, Glimmer Train‘s Short Fiction Award, the Owl Creek Poetry Prize and several fellowships at The MacDowell Colony. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.

Editor’s Note: It seems so simple. Eight lines. Four stanzas. Setup, volta, powerful ending. But how to entrap the reader so deftly in a few quick strokes? How to convey the depth of loss in such a space? What deception, what brutal truth, what devastation. It takes a master of her craft to wright such a poem; Cohen makes it appear effortless.

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