‘Pissing on the Lawn of a Foreclosed Home’
— Hannah Cohen
What’s another patch of dead grass anyway?
Echoing the moods of Baudelaire and O’Hara, Ariel’s poems are often dim and bright in their more vulnerable moments. It’s one thing to write about drunken loneliness, but Ariel takes the often-humiliating act of public urination and turns into self-deprecating humor seen in “grimy window[s]”. Truly, the beauty of this poem rests on that chorus of “frogs … crying for someone else”—that loud distance which only increases the claustrophobia of this short poem. You don’t need to know the beginning or even really the end of this narrative, but you’ve already been there, under “[t]hat gold coin of a moon”.