Ezra Lebovitz

Hannah La Follette Ryan is the New York based photographer behind @subwayhands, a viral Instagram account which showcases portraits of strangers’ hands on the subway and boasts over 250 thousand followers. Poetry board member Ezra Lebovitz and design board member Anna Correll spoke with her via email this January about her work, her method, and the rules of subway decorum.

This time, I want it to be simple: say you are
a fresh, cool lemon. Your rind is dotted with wet.

Say I have a tongue and lick away the wetness,
have hands and excavate the seeds.

I pull you out of yourself. I raise newness.
Everything tastes yellow and the sea-line is a line

down my throat. The lemon is a line across
the sky and that too is what you are: everything

mistaken for something else, the citrus getting larger, blooming.
Are you blooming? Are you in bloom? Tell me how you feel.

You don’t have to be a lemon if you don’t want to.
The rind could slip from my hand, if you asked for it.

I only want to speak to you. I’ve known lemons before:
tendrils of fruit clutching to the white, hand unhooked,

every cold, flowered thing giving way to water. Things change
when I speak and fruits flower, open slowly, without knowing it.

Try this: the dig of your finger under stem, stopping
crooked between flesh and peel. So what if when I dream

I dream citrus? I can taste even the farthest slick of air,
unlace semblance from skin. I can feed in pieces.

When I call out your name, it is your name
before it is anything else.

Later, I can ask you about the rest.



Title is taken from Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica."

Last week, scientists found a new moon:
a second one, peculiar and small.

The poets will be excited. Maybe now
they can write about the moon without consequence

since it will be new, and free of tropes.
Perhaps they will hang on it like honey.

There’s a part of me that thinks if we can get a new moon
then maybe anything could happen. Like maybe I could hand you