Bombshell I

Alfred Eisenstaedt

The Revolving Door

Alfred Eisenstaedt

The Revolving Door

An old man stoops to fix his lady’s shoe
And what of him and her, of me and you?

My neck burns to counter my ineffable laze;
The Sun lowers. She surrenders her role
In a blood-orange bed, suicide-red.
The color of the abandoned and aborted.
The flash light of an overboard fright,

Alas, where is my heart that had once grown so high?
The clouds skate by like airplanes;
The time goes.

How many people have I been
In my desperate anarchy
In my frantic long-division?

Fifty voices crowd the broken room.

Curse this unrealized peace,
This unquenchable throat, so lost in nerves,
That knows not where to sing!

The water rises closer near the door
And fear unfastens like the violent undoing
Of a nation;
The fast unravel—


[copyright Taylor Roberts, 2006]

City Poems

I.

i must have seen twenty napkins surf wind
along the filthy street,

an old lover’s musk finally washed off my hands
so i folded them onto my breasts and wept,

the fuse is short for
foster homes and
college dorms and
evaporating rain.

all the women shout, let that be a lesson to you

(was it brown or blonde?)
(was that a book in his lap, or a napkin?)

i have turned away from him so many times.
i’m a whirling dervish.
he’ll sit and listen
as i quietly revolve under the bed.



II.

crooning from the shower,
his voice sweeps out and floods the floor
wets my socks and shoes-

licks me til I’m cold
and then he leaves me old.

baby, before you
go, press into my chest with
your palm. burst this
watery body at every
orifice. you can

leave the city
and me
to take care of each other.


[copyright Taylor Roberts, 2004]

The Kiss that Burned Chicago Down

"After all, a girl is... well, a girl.

It's nice to be told you're successful at it."

-Rita Hayworth

In the Ruin

Downtown NYC after Sept 11, by Tony Karp

In the Ruin
by Colin Dodds


We are gone, so gone from that place
that we have stationed the angel
with the flaming sword before it,
just to be sure we would not go there anymore.

It’s just down the street
from where the world hinges
on the difference between
one piece of paper and another.

Last week is so long ago
that the firemen digging through the rubble
have become archaeologists
digging in the ruins.

They do so to learn how folks
lived a week ago, if any did.
They dare not remember a week ago,
but are lonely for it.

Fall creeps in like an anonymous letter
under a closed door.
Everyone is dead in the ruin.
But something must be done

to guard against our weakness
or to find the right way to die,
to forget or subdue the knowledge
we summon too much of.

The will is strong. The senses
are subtle. The intelligence is deep.
This is not easy
and does not end.

It is the time after the cracked glass
has been shattered anew,
after we’ve been slaughtered, but before
we’ve undertaken slaughter of our own.

By the deli, the jewelry store with its sale,
our neighbors rot in an uneven cage.
There is nothing beneath them but gold
and nothing above them but the sickened living.

The firemen do not dig for clues
The case is open and shut. Nor for the dead.
The dead and the world are so strange,
we think them odd stones shaped by chance.



Forgetfulness is what will wash us to newness.
We can not yet guess if a year, a life
will be the right length
for the forgetting that needs to be done.


[copyright Medium Rare Publishing, 2003]

Critical Mass

Alfred Eisenstaedt

Critical Mass
(for justin and pierre)

There was anger outside of saint marks church
The day Pierre died
Bikes hung from every steeple
People littered streets with empty cups
It was September and my naked heart fell
Down the perennial well.

We’d sought hope and we harnessed it
Down at the Center
Collected the numbers hovering close to the ground
Cut our hair into brushes to dip in the soot
And drew zeros all over our foreheads—

But I’ve been impressed on the sidewalk
Since June
My old man keeps rifles, now, in with the spoons
The boys hide their faces and grow out their beards
And curse the war years.

And my heart’s in the water
Looking for my friends
While these stubborn men stand on the ashen blue plans
For a fat, lonely country and a little oil land
The right ones who grip on their crosses like triggers
Just nod at the sheepdogs
And sleep by their windows
And wait for September again…


[copyright Taylor Roberts, 2004]

Critical Mass Arrests of 2004 amid the RNC

For The Boys

Anita Ekberg 1953, by Phil Stern

Initiation
by Colin Dodds

With one ejaculation,
I was exiled from mythology
and pushed into the streets.
I made my debut in that birth canal
that never gives birth,
but only replaces and replaces.

I found a spastic moment of peace.
And it bothered me more than loneliness did.
Its relief was just one more law sunk into me.
I was no match for that peace.
I spent half my life chasing it down
and the other half trying to escape it.

I wanted my desire to swell enough
to dissolve the rest of me
or to vanish altogether.
Neither occurred.

Not Built for Wisdom
by Colin Dodds

I spurned those who wanted
to be closer to me
because you can’t be god
in someone else’s heaven.

I told myself and them
that I wouldn’t be around too long,
that I heard music in my head
that was really music.

Only a sound, a voice
that exists completely
before giving a hint of itself
can appear like that, like music.

And I wouldn’t be so
selfish
if it didn’t seem that what I had
was so specifically my own.


[copyright Medium Rare Publishing, 2003]

Dylan Writing, by Daniel Kramer

Anita Ekberg contact sheet, 1953 by Phil Stern

Fallen Magnolias

Alfred Eisenstaedt

"New Orleans, meanwhile, remained mostly deserted on Tuesday, with the occasional resident who ignored the evacuation order sweeping up outside. There was scant evidence of the clean-up promised by officials, with a carpeting of tree limbs, fallen magnolias and fractured crepe myrtles on the streets."

- NY Times September 3, 2008

Weegee's "Water Main Burst Uproots Madison Avenue," circa 1938

Marble-Sized Song

Marble-Sized Song
by Albert Goldbarth

Does she love you? She says yes, but really
how do you know unless you undress that easy assertion,
undoing its petals and laminae, and going in
below all trace of consciousness, into the neuroelectrical
coffer where self-understanding is storaged away,
and then lifting its uttermost molecule out, to study
in its nakedness as it spins
in a clinical light?—the way
we all, in our various individual versions
of this common human urge, go in,
and in, and in, the physicist down
to the string-vibration underlying matter, and
the Appalachia fiddler getting so
(as she puts it) "into my music," sound becomes
a flesh for her to intimately ("in"-timately)
enter, "its thick and its sweetbreads."
Is he cheating on you? He says no, and feigns
that he's insulted, but for certainty
you'll need to delicately strip the bark away
and drill, and tweeze, until you can smear a microscope slide
of the pith and can augur the chitterlings
—the way the philosopher can't accept a surface
assumption of truth, but needs to peel back
the fatty sheen of the dermis, soak the cambium layer
into a blow-away foam, and then with pick
and lightbeam helmet, inch by inch begin
spelunking through those splayed-out caverns
under the crust, where gems of cogitation are buried
—the way the diver descends for the pearl,
the miner: in, the archaeologist: in, the therapist: down
the snakier roots of us and in, and in, the way
the lone, leg-pretzeled yogi makes
a glowing bathysphere of worldliness and sends it in,
and further in, tinier and heavier and ever in,
the way the man in the opium den is floating forever,
toward a horizon positioned in the center of the center
of his head. . . . If we could stand beyond the border
of our species and consider us objectively, it might seem
that our purpose in existing is to be a living agency
that balances, or maybe even slows, the universe's
irreversible expansion out, and out . . . and each
of us, a contribution to that task.
My friend John's wife received the news: a "growth,"
a "mass," on her pituitary, marble-sized, mysterious.
And the primary-care physician said: Yes,
we must go in and in. That couldn't be the final word!
And the second-opinion physician said: Yes,
my sweet-and-shivering-one,
my fingerprint-and-irisprint-uniqueness,
someone's-dearest, you
who said the prayers at Juliette's grave, who drove
all night from Switzerland with your daughter, you
on this irreplaceable day in your irreplaceable skin
in the scumbled light as it crosses the bay in Corpus Christi,
yes in the shadows, yes in the radiance,
yes we must go in and in.


[copyright © 2008 by The Poetry Foundation]

Well Wrought

A piano rests under a tree a few days after hurricane Katrina.

Well Wrought

The milk in the azure light is annihilating.
My neighbor’s boots rap tree against tree against wood.
The cars thrash past like surf their brakes, waves whining.

Love is like all figments too quick to measure.
How many handfuls of heat? How much blood?
The leaves are green on the ground, they have not aged.

Every engine teases me and leaves me.
They make my skin pull thin, tugged tight as tin.
I wait in line like an angry evacuee.

It is a beautiful day, why do you run from me?
Is it you’ve seen my well, my panic-siren?
My thick tree wails, the breeze, the branch, the root.
The leaves will drop without the sounds of dying.

Below the beautiful bellow of the wind
The questions have a repetitious echo.
They pester like impatient children,
When will you be home? They press and pry.

A trillion little stitches made in time
Led up to this. They weren’t always mine.
I’m knitting them together like a sweater
With the alpaca bleating as I bind.

A thousand voices swell up in the spinach;
Micro-chips from lives I had forgot.
Answer them with your name, announce your coming!

The fire’s breath is injuring my faith;
The cars, the doors, the rain, the random rain.
A wooden tree is reaching through my window,
She is alive and much too wet to burn!

You will come home, your car will soon arrive,
You’ll enter through my window with the water
And tiptoe to my body, bare and longing,
And whisper love like nothing had gone wrong.

And all my raveling, all my tidy knots
Will unwind slowly all around the bed,
And undo all the trauma I’ve constructed,
And leave my empty hands, my heavy head.


[copyright Taylor Roberts, 2005]

above photo by Debbie Fleming Caffery