Angelo Nikolopoulos

Angelo Nikolopoulos is the recipient of the 2011 Discovery's Boston Review Poetry Prize and a graduate of NYU's Creative Writing Program. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2011, Boston Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, Gay and Lesbian Review, Los Angeles Review, Meridian, New York Quarterly, and elsewhere. He teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and hosts The White Swallow, a queer reading series in Manhattan.

After the Burial

If sympathy is to share in the disaster,
then why delphinium
and amaranthus, bells of Ireland—
these delicate, green fists?
Why not rebar,
shreds of drywall and plywood—
why not brick?
Why not soot and slab,
to gut, to hammer out,
the corrugated steel of grief?
To gather you a parcel of wires,
rusted screws,
with difficulty, with troubled face—
the iron and stain,
this reddened tincture of oxide.