Spring 2017 Season

Fifty-eight percent of the men and women at whom you smile while grocery shopping say the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified “often” or “sometimes.” Fifty-seven percent of the men and women who hold a restaurant door open for you say harsh interrogation techniques can provide information that can prevent terrorist attacks. Army Field Manual 34-52 Chapter 1 reads: “Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.” And yet.

I watched my mother
(Who had grown
All of her fingernails
Very long) choose
Not to dust or clean
The house that day

Instead she polished
Each pointy oval tip
A bright candy pink
Twice over then added
A translucent topcoat
And let them air-dry

While she eased back
Ignoring everything:
The kitchen, my father,
Even me, and leisured
To read Prisoner of Desire
On our old green sofa.

My mother passed down
your 18 carat pinky ring.

An heirloom showpiece.
Thick-built manly thing

boasting a square-cut garnet
that crowned dead center.

But I sold the gold
to an old fogey

at a curio shop.
He pressed and pushed

his thumb clean through
the rear end

until the gem broke free.
Then dropped

your popped cherry
in my palm for keeps.

Carbon, what’s left after water
vapor’s risen along with smoke,
the fire’s remainder a blackness

of orphaned atoms. Carbon, chains
wound up inside us, thirsts and murders
its side arrangements, braided fuse

igniting the present’s spark-light
in the black of was and will be. Carbon,
footprint of our fumbling, our cutting

down our origin’s columns
to stoke a stone hearth. And a diamond—
hard dry tear of still here,

a long-ago life pressed pure
in the dark under a forest, pick-axed
by a hard-worked dark-skinned miner—

you’ll wear it, held by a few silver
prongs to a silver wire to ring
your thin slow-burning finger.

A single match isn’t worth shit
and she knows it. Is everyone
really ignoring her or is she
just feeling sorry for herself?
You can’t tell me she goes
unnoticed: a girl on the boulevard
half dressed. Someone out here
is into that kind of thing, but
what advice do we have for her,
ladies? What about fair trade
and quiet acquiescence?
Think Cinderella, Snow White
or any number of dolls who held
their wares aloft like flaming cakes.
Call it a modern day fairy tale:
A girl on a street corner,
a couple of matches to her name,
a holy host of magazines plying
her with pithy asides and makeup
application tricks: You, too, can have
this couch, this fire, this tree, this man,
all you have to do is freeze.

Decisive, divisive, deceptive,
the lack of room to breathe
fully, what context blooms
to meaning, the walls only fogged
remembrance. Rain spokes
from trees, clops on roof,
tinks at window. Mold stink sifts
from sills and rotting porch.
Bone swallow, blue hollow.
Place subtracted.
Time excised.