Richie Hofmann

• DIE KRÄHE

• I get a haircut in Berlin—
• dual knives moving against one another.
•  
• I follow the black boots
• down the avenue.
   
• Militaristic fashions
• have taken their place among the gay bourgeois,
•  
• mixing violence
• and aesthetic pleasure.
•  
• Big Russian crows squawk in the trees
• of the Tiergarten,
•  
• where princes once
• hunted and fished.
•  
• Men are not the only animals
• that use hooks to catch
•  
• other animals. But only men
• cut the hair away from their heads and faces—
•  
• even firstborn sons
• who love their bodies as they are.

RICHIE HOFMANN is the author of a collection of poems, Second Empire (2015). His poetry appears in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Poetry. He is a 2017-19 Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.