Shook Up

Abstract

Shook Up Sascha Feinstein (bio) Something about his ambivalence, how he sluggishly relinquished his limbs into the rowboat to search for his missing wife. I was eight. What did I know of marriage or murder, though a year later, a local said I was right, told my mother no bay current could force a body beneath a rock, not like that, at least. But he got off. If my parents were still alive, perhaps they'd remember more, though it hardly matters. A man dove with his wife, bear-hugged her, knocked the oxygen from her mouth till she drowned, then wedged her body so it might appear she snagged her leg and panicked. Shook up, the lifeguard said when I told her he did it. You should have seen when he first came to shore. Sascha Feinstein Sascha Feinstein won the Hayden Carruth Award for his poetry collection Misterioso. He has published two critical books, Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present and, as coeditor with Yusef Komunyakaa, The Jazz Poetry Anthology and its companion volume, The Second Set. His next book, Ask Me Now: Conversations on Jazz & Literature, will be published later in the year by Indiana University Press. He codirects the creative writing program at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and edits Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature, which he founded ten years ago. Copyright © 2007 The Curators of the University of Missouri