The 2025 Michael True Memorial Poetry Reading with Edgar Kunz

Edgar Kunz is the author of Fixer (Ecco, 2023), a New York Times Editors Choice book, and Tap Out (Ecco, 2019). He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His poems and essays have appeared widely, including in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Oxford American. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College and in the low-residency Newport MFA.

Piano

I held him together
as long as I could, she says.

He stopped working,
stopped coming upstairs.

He was like tissue paper
coming apart in water.

Like smoke in my hands.
It had nothing to do

with you, baby.You left
when you had to.

I met a woman once
who worked on pianos.

Said it was a hard job.
The tools, the leverage.

The required ear. I love it,
she said, but it’s brutal.

The second I step away
it’s already falling out of tune.

—Edgar Kunz