11.2 Fall/Winter 2013

Christopher Kondrich Remonstrance

I survive myself on the street under the dome of echo hung there.
I survive myself skinny, that I had strayed and felt torn.
I survive myself in the morning, morning says.
Survive each evening as the evening comes on.
I survive the loosely knitted only to stop at tightly wound,
beyond which I survive myself solid again.
I watch myself survive at the end of a letter.
I watch through the portal by surviving my sight.
I am seized by survival. I sting with it.
I feel a constant emerging-from-the-abyss.
I feel a stone still stone in still smaller form.
I am desperate to die. I start by surviving.


Christopher Kondrich is the author of Contrapuntal (Parlor Press 2013) and a winner of The Paris-American Reading Series Prize. New poems appear or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Guernica, The Paris-American and Washington Square.