Poems by Mandy Kahn  ​

This Man
 
 
You think you know your neighbor? No;
there are despairs of which we do not speak.
There are old harms of which we do not speak.
And there he goes, with his trash bags
and his too-shorn haircut, down to his driveway’s edge,
before the folds from sleeping leave his face,
before the steam from coffee spreads his eyes,
swollen parka making him a mound,
body you’ve seen stoop to carry
children, leaf-mush, laundry, one flat tire: no.
There are despairs of which we do not speak,
a kind of Greek no scholar translates right.
Stooping low from something, maybe labor,
shuffling his lot, first step, next step,
as you shuffle yours. Bowed low
with a weight no learned scholar translates right.
Look at him go, this huddled, hidden God-fleck
that you cannot, do not know.
 
 
 
Maidenhair
 
I
am the lilting fern
my mother warned
I shouldn’t buy. Those, she said,
are lovely, but they’re hard to keep alive.
 
I took one home, sprayed
with a scrupulous tenderness
leaves so delicate
 
they were like that painting
of Ophelia in a pond.
 
I bought a misting bottle;
I doted and I watched.
 
Each leaf shivered wildly
from a gust of passing breath,
and the branch that each leaf rose from
was a hand’s miniscule artery,
the place where the vein
gets so small
it’s a hair, and then not even a hair.
 
I loved that fern, and tended it,
as now I love and tend myself.
Note the tender skin on me,
see it blanch from passing air,
watch the tiny cilia hairs
that lift from me, this feeling-its-way amoeba.
 
I did not change to tree-trunk,
I did not grow a pebbled rough rhinoceros hide
between inside and out,
between soft flesh and sky.
 
I am, as I always was,
near too gossamer to live, and yet
receiving weather, rearranging,
stretching up again: still here.
 
 

Mandy Kahn is the author of three poetry collections; her fourth is forthcoming in 2026. Her poems have been included in the Best American Poetry anthology and featured in the national newspaper column American Life in Poetry. She has been interviewed by BBC Radio and the Los Angeles Review of Books, profiled in Flaunt and Issue magazines, and has given readings at institutions including Cambridge University, the Getty Museum, MOCA, the Barrick Museum, and the L.A. Times Festival of Books. Her performance-based poems are the subject of the feature-length documentary Peace Piece: The Immersive Poems of Mandy Kahn.

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