Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday

Why Aren’t You Angry?

It’s not that I’m not, but sometimes
the only way to wear a glove is inside out.

On the train platform, the oldest woman
in the world is clapping along to a music

only she can hear. Or, she’s clapping
to a silence which is its own kind of music.

Some letters wake up upset to find
themselves in words. A sunset flattened

on an ugly postcard will always want to rip
itself from the sky. We don’t know if

an empty Doritos bag or an unread
postcolonial novella says more about

the dystopian crack over the campus sky,
yet I keep trying to explain to you how

I could continue to wash mushrooms
while you were crying about a stranger

whose murder caused a whole city
to scream. I want to tell you that

a moon shaped like a clown’s nose
is closer to my mood than your tattoo

of a burning fist. On Central Ave,
a man with a half-shaved dog blows

into a saxophone and the crowd dances
along. On the Riverwalk, we each lose

a single earbud. I lose my left, you your
right, but somehow we find ourselves

the next day each alone—lounging
in a yellow bedroom or walking

the edges of a frozen lake—still able
to hear the essential color of the song.

Joanna Fuhrman is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University and the author of seven books of poetry, including Data Mind (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press), To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press 2021). Her poems have appeared in many journals, including The Believer, The Baffler, Conduit, Fence, The Georgia Review, and Plume, as well as on the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets (poem-a-day) websites. Poems have also appeared in Best American Poetry (2023 and 2025), The Pushcart Prize anthology, and The Slowdown podcast. She first published poetry in Hanging Loose Magazine as a teenager and became a co-editor of the press in 2022.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx