slapped blue
dark brown hair
—a wad
in your hand
~
november comes
this scene
—indelible:
a child’s chair
(for tea with dolls)
split in half
flat
& i’m
at your feet
on my knees
please please
daddy please
v
you sit—slumped
elbows at right
angles your thick hands
in folds across your broad chest
sock-hatted
head nodding
these days you sleep
in this chair (the nights—
too long)
last night i paced
the floor all night
you say
all night
you say
again
as if my ears
could ease
your pain
i lean closer
i’m sorry i whisper
weak words that break
in my mouth (i can’t help you
i wish i could)
you don’t give a shit about me
you say
and though i do i tell you i do
i do daddy i love you
you’ve snapped
& there is no
going back
Alia Neaton
Cosmogony I
History tells us we
Climbed from the slime of
Phoenicia, dripping with
Disease and burning for
Change. In the cradle of
Civilization, deep
Ridges above our eyes,
We poured in what we
Could learn of the world,
Of how it was, we thought,
Thought of how it could be.
We couldn’t be stopped
Until the Fertile Crescent bulged
With words written, with
The glitter of glass, the spin
Of a rough wheel. We
Began in the womb of the
World, where subspecies
Died until progress rose and
Stood on shaky legs and
Surveyed the land and the
Scope of the sea and then
Wondered about it all.
What we believe dies
In flame, rises. History
Repeats to the scourge of
Sons. As soon as man saw
Man, they started fighting.
Soft glow, microscopic
Scaffold, double
Helix—our computed
Code: programming
Madness. The sun burns as
It falls behind New Jersey.
An Eastern Seaboard awash
With anger and sweat and the
Sting of the sea. When we dig
Into our past, we discover
Secrets. When we find
Truth, we are changed.
When we change, we burn.
Cosmogony II
In the lounge of the
Aurora House on
47th Street,
Commemoration
In art of those lost
To AIDS. A prayer
Wall of wounds, long gashes
Bleeding one into
The other. Each slip
Exposing someone
Else’s precious memory.
A massive wall of
Wishes, a wall holding
Up hope and despair,
Broken bows of remembrance,
Of a community unloading
Their heavy hearts so that,
One-by-one,
They may be lifted.
Cosmogony III
Snow blotches
Spectral ground,
The stubborn,
Icy piles
Squatting still,
Reluctant
To let spring
In. A rat
Streaks across
The alley,
Over scraps
Of paper,
Glass, and the
Old tire-tread
Remains of
Another rat.
A woman
Stands, shadowed,
Inside her
Screen door. Smoke
Curls from her
Cigarette,
While the white
Cheshire moon
Smirks in the
Sky, trailed by
Two glowing
Planets—a
Kite tail of
Jupiter
And Venus,
Frozen ten,
Only ten,
Degrees a
Part in, a
Part of the
Celestial
Curtain that
Encloses
Us from the
Brittle chill
Of boundless,
Blackened
Horizon.
Cosmogony IV
A world away from me,
My blood burns in the sand.
A city in shambles and a family of one
Stand still on a dusty morning.
The blue sky lays shrouded in grey
And the streets are silent and strange.
Since yesterday’s dusk, the storm raged on.
Now the city doesn’t know her face.
There was a display outside.
Did we feel safe behind walls?
Across our city, a fire blazed,
And structures crumbled and fell.
The glass balcony glowed red,
Refracted auburn streaks shimmered,
Distorted on the panes.
Deep garnet splashed the bedroom
Bathing us in shades of fire and blood.
Cosmogony V
In what was a sunlit dining room,
The arc of time snaps.
As sure as I feel the smooth
Finish of wood table beneath
My hand, I know it is not
Real. A tangle of atoms
Held together by the mind
And what the mind conceives
As a table.
In what was a Tuesday afternoon,
Oak splinters and fades.
Raw matter bursts
Beneath my fingers—
Spectrum of color
And radiance, rays
Exploding outward,
Dissolving the impression
Of world around it. It is terrible and
Beautiful, the nature of this world.
The primal bay of anguish rises:
I cannot conceive a reality without him.
But then, I cannot conceive this reality at all.
Elisa Albo
Each Day More
for Alexander Standiford
How do we negotiate
this one, the utter fragility
between here and gone,
the thinnest filament?
An eighteen-year-old,
your youngest, the baby
you carried, fed with
your mother fingers,
your father hands,
the boy you photographed
to capture and keep still,
and worried, driving him
to games, movies so many
lessons, to college, away,
into the world. How do we
carry on? How do we look
into your mother eyes, your
father face, the sibling hearts?
His life loomed large with yours,
buoyed by books art food drink,
by the laughter we gathered
each August of his life
to welcome new students
with the old. Then we entered
your home not in summer,
to a space suspended
between the ache of the gravel
driveway and the blades
of grass in the backyard,
the chill of the pool water
and the shade on the rooftop
patio, leaving us poised
with pain in air we’re made
to breathe, untethered,
as if the gravity that holds
each child to the earth
has lost some of its force,
and there is too much sky,
each day more.
Artie
Accountant. A startled bird, the word
escaped three times the next day,
flit from the radio, dropped out
of the mouth of a salesman, then
from a stranger in the street. I didn’t
want to hear it. I didn’t want to know
of numbers—bills, taxes. His age: 46.
Three, his children: 16, 12, 9. The date,
the last day of Passover, forever
marked in the Blackberry mind
like birthdays on or near deaths—
my sister’s next to my grandmother’s,
my daughter’s on my cousins’—
or like the ages one holds one’s breath
to pass over, those regular doves,
because my grandfather didn’t and
my uncle didn’t and my cousins
who flew suddenly, their skin still
smooth. I don’t want to hear of numbers,
calculators, balances. A moth taps
on my bathroom window, trapped
when I closed it earlier. Debit, credit.
If I crank it open, I’ll wake the sleeping.
If I don’t, it will die, sooner. Too soon.
The last time I saw Artie was at our nephew’s
bar mitzvah, November 17th. Thirteen.
Three times that weekend—Saturday
morning service, evening celebration,
Sunday brunch. He and I stood in
my brother’s living room, spoke of his
daughter, 12. Her three black belts.
She played with my daughter, 5.
I don’t want to know of numbers,
parties, food, though I made a cake
to take to his house, their house
minus one. To make the cake,
separate four eggs, measure a cup
of sugar, a half cup of cocoa, set the oven
temperature, the timer, for . . . . how long?
Hurricane Sandy, 2012
Perhaps she dreams they are swimming,
propelled by waves that collected them
from her arms, small legs kicking to stay
afloat now that they’ve learned to swim
the waters of Staten Island. They are thrilled,
as children are when they learn to swim,
to read, to ride a bike. Holding hands,
the four-year-old protective of the two-year-old—
that’s how she sees them when she wakes,
when she walks through the neatness
of emptiness and half expects to find
small forms on their big boy beds, blankets
kicked off, so that she’ll enter quietly, navigate
toys strewn on the floor, cover their bodies.
She used to run her hand across the forehead
of one, the curly hair of the other, and smile,
thinking, They’re beautiful when they sleep.
With their births, she became a light sleeper,
listening for a cry, a cough, for her name.
At the grocery store, she reaches for cereal,
moves past apple juice boxes. Driving home,
she sees neighbors still cleaning up after
the storm, clearing debris, repairing homes.
For many, the lights have come back on.
Inside her house, she rests her head against
a window frame. Where are the small, bright
faces that so resemble hers? She waits for
a faint knock on the door, to open it, to find them
before her, a little taller, wet, so happy to see her.
The Pianist, Final Scene
Once again he sits at the piano in the Polish radio station,
the studio wood shiny and intact, no bombs exploding,
no plaster dust falling or young men diving for cover.
Once again he sits at the piano, tall and clean shaven,
healthy. The waterfalls and rustling leaves of Bach fly
from his fingers, filling the air with their light, the sound
engineer behind glass, smiling, rapt. Once again he is
playing this piano. When a friend he hasn’t seen since before
the war enters, the pianist, still playing, looks over, smiles
a joyful greeting that, unlike the notes, fades, gradually
saddens to include the faces of his mother, his father,
a brother, two sisters who listened and laughed each day
as he played in their home, who perished in the camps
while he ran, hid, froze, starved nearly to death, and once
again plays on the radio and in concert halls for survivors.
Terezin
1997
The camp sits empty now. Knots of tour groups peer
into dusty barracks, glance at communal toilets, over
stone walls rising from a dry moat that never defended
a thing or being. Along the paths between buildings,
gravel cracks, crunches. The noise wrecks the air,
my ears, the inner barracks of my heart each time I step
like stepping on bones, graves—who knows in this dust
what remains? Ushered into a low building we scurry
through a long, narrow passage and abruptly out to,
the guide informs, the very spot where people were
shot. I look down to my feet. I want to rise above
the ground, to not step anywhere. During the war,
did Red Cross workers who visited this model camp
an hour east of Prague believe the Nazi propaganda
film, makeshift stores, soccer games and cheering
crowds were real? Stopping at a memorial that holds
a fistful of soil from other camps, Sara, a young woman
from New York, bends down for a stone to place on
the marble and in a parallel gesture, I bend with her,
as I’ve done at my grandmother’s grave, to remember . . .
yisgadal, v’yisgadash, sh’ may rabo . . . the Kaddish
spills from my lips, first lines, all I recall of the Hebrew
prayer for the dead. I rush out of the compound—
past rows of bright white crosses, Stars of David,
bunches of red carnations like thousands of small
explosions or individual burning bushes in front
of each unnamed marker—into the parking lot
past food stands, tourists eating candy and rapidly
dissolving ice cream, cameras strung from their necks.
The floor in the Terezin Museum is carpeted, voices
hushed. Galleries split with partitions display pictures
and papers—an edict, a warning, several orders, plans,
charts, drawings, photographs, records, so many careful
records naming victims, giving them faces, people who
passed through trains to Belzec, Chelmo, Majdanek,
&nb
sp; Sobibor, Treblinka, and Osvetim, Czech for Auschwitz,
everything typed up, written down, catalogued, thoroughly
documented, as if someone someday would need to know
exactly to whom, precisely when, where, how many . . .
why? On a monitor in several galleries, an elderly woman
recounts her days in Terezin, her words close captioned
in English for the multitudes of tourists, many of whom sigh,
having had enough of death and despair for one day. But
the videotape is on a loop—she cannot stop telling her story.
Noah B. Salamon
Sanctuary
Of an empty bed
small and cool and neat
of a pillow
I used to hide there
Of the swish of skin on cotton
of the ticking of the old clock
of the corner, all wall
Of the way the floor creaked
sudden pops, like some remote glacier
Of the shivering radiator pipes
beginning with the merest shake
Of a vibration, something so small
of a metallic whisper, miles below ground
Of tiles that glow white in the darkness
like ghostly lilies, floating
Of the bathtub, looming white
of the chipped wood desk
Of the dark, full of frights
and comfort
Memorial
Something needs mending
something always does
Things wear and fray and
wear out
Things rustle and stir in
this ashy darkness, things
creak and moan and finally give
See, what I have left are
bits of conversation, glances and
moments left behind
like old letters
in a faded box
New York Story
I came to New York once, for three months
to watch you die, slowly
in hospital beds, then in our apartment,
rented month by month, three months
past our wedding day
The stores had different names
but sold the same things–
the sympathy cards, like fallen leaves
the commerce of despair–
I tried to walk on the surface
like a Jesus bug
drowning if I fell
I let the days move by in splashes
I saw the contradictions