John Freeman is a writer, a literary critic, the former president of the National Book Critics Circle, and a recipient of the James Patterson Pageturner Award. His numerous works include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as a trilogy of anthologies about inequality, including Tales of Two Planets, which features stories about the climate crisis from around the world. He is also the author of three poetry collections, Maps, The Park, and Wind, Trees (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). Freeman lives in New York City.

Marriage

by John Freeman

A man and a woman
joined by newspaper pages
culture to politics
sit so still
I’m not sure
if they’re there
at all. She
breathes, turns a
ruffled folio, and
like a dancer moving
around a partner,
he folds a great
page in two, and
peers up
in expectation of what
he needs to know.

People on couch
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