Dana Koster
Flight of Ideas
if lack of feeling is a symptom
we call anhedonia if chewing
the inside of my cheeks is wrong
I don’t want to be wrong
Maggie are peasant skirts
part of the therapist uniform Maggie
I find your bangles distracting
& when you clasp your hands
& tilt your head you look
very much like an interested dog
who also has hands
when the wringing of hands
has become psychomotor agitation
blink fifteen times
but only fifteen
feeling too is a symptom
of a larger illness
the birds of optimism
chirp away at the roof
poised for ―
Anhedonia
Lack of hedonism, they say,
is the first sign. Without pleasure.
Without desire for pleasure.
The numbing of wonder,
of wander, pleasure
for pleasure’s sake excised
& replaced with pink
noise. Without pleasure
is calm. With calmness
even suffering becomes
a kind of pleasure.
Dana Koster grew up on the coasts of Southern California and has earned degrees from UC Berkeley and Cornell University. She was a 2011-2013 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the 2012 recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. Her poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Cincinnati Review, Bellevue Literary Review and many others. She lives in California’s Central Valley with her husband and young son.
Return to November 2013 Edition
if lack of feeling is a symptom
we call anhedonia if chewing
the inside of my cheeks is wrong
I don’t want to be wrong
Maggie are peasant skirts
part of the therapist uniform Maggie
I find your bangles distracting
& when you clasp your hands
& tilt your head you look
very much like an interested dog
who also has hands
when the wringing of hands
has become psychomotor agitation
blink fifteen times
but only fifteen
feeling too is a symptom
of a larger illness
the birds of optimism
chirp away at the roof
poised for ―
Anhedonia
Lack of hedonism, they say,
is the first sign. Without pleasure.
Without desire for pleasure.
The numbing of wonder,
of wander, pleasure
for pleasure’s sake excised
& replaced with pink
noise. Without pleasure
is calm. With calmness
even suffering becomes
a kind of pleasure.
Dana Koster grew up on the coasts of Southern California and has earned degrees from UC Berkeley and Cornell University. She was a 2011-2013 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the 2012 recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. Her poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Cincinnati Review, Bellevue Literary Review and many others. She lives in California’s Central Valley with her husband and young son.
Return to November 2013 Edition