Defining the Problem
–Wendy CopeI can’t forgive you. Even if I could,
You wouldn’t pardon me for seeing through you.
And yet I cannot cure myself of love
For what I thought you were before I knew you.
Song of the Ironing Board
–Ted KooserSo many hands lay hot on my belly
over the years, and oh, how many ghosts
I held, their bodies damp and slack
their long arms fallen to either side.
I gave till my legs shook, but then
they were up and away. Thus the lovely
soft nap of my youth was worn down.
But I gave of myself and was proud.I was there for those Saturday
touchups, those solemn Sunday
sacraments of Clorox in the church
of starch, the hangers ringing.
On stiffening legs I suffered
the steam iron’s hot incontinence,
the melt-down of the rayon slacks,
my batting going varicose.And it all came down to this:
a cellar window looking out
on February, where a cold wind
pinches clothespins down an empty line.
I lean against the wall and breathe
the drifting smoke of memory,
a stained chemise pulled over
my scorched yet ever shining heart.
Page
–Rudy FranciscoIt just sits there, with a mouth
full of entitlement, staring at you
and wondering why it is still
not a masterpiece.
The Hammer
–Connie Wanek
Not unlike many fans of Netflix’s gripping Mindhunter series, I am ashamed to say I had never heard of the Atlanta child murders, a focus of Mindhunter‘s season two. When the actual murders took place, I was little more than a toddler myself, but this is never an excuse for ignorance. After all, I find myself frustrated when I talk to youngsters who claim to “love Ted Danson” but know him only in the context of The Good Place, claiming never to have heard of Cheers because it was broadcast originally long before they were alive. So what? Sergeant Pepper was released long before I was born, but I know it, can sing along with it. The Donna Reed Show predates my entire existence, but I’m fully aware of it. We have had reruns in perpetuity. Perhaps we live in an age devoid of all memory, despite being able to conjure up the past with an instant internet search – nothing is ever gone. We are surrounded by and immersed in noise and content from the past and present. Maybe it’s too difficult to swim through all of it to find the linear path of, for example, Ted Danson’s long television history, given the onslaught of everything we are steeped in and the expectation to keep moving forward.
This digression is altogether too frivolous for the subject matter, though. Watching Mindhunter, I found myself having to Google whether the spate of murders it depicted was based on reality. I wasn’t alone. As the story unfolded, it grew more terrifying and shocking – all the more because, until recently, it is a story that seems never to have made lasting headlines. No one I asked (even people much older than me who regularly followed the news at the height of these crimes) had ever heard of this story. The horror of the crimes is viscerally disturbing enough, but what has disturbed and occupied me since seeing Mindhunter is the widespread ignorance to the fact that these serial murders ever happened.
These disappearances and deaths of children in Atlanta occurred at the tail-end of the 1970s and early 1980s – not too long after the high-profile reign of terror wrought by serial killer Ted Bundy. The difference? The Atlanta murders were all black children. Bundy killed young white women. As ever, who gets the public spotlight? This is not new, so I should not be surprised. Not knowing about the Atlanta children until nearly 40 years later makes me feel hopeless and helpless … not just because I didn’t know about it but also that this information has not been in the public eye at all during my entire lifetime (while Bundy remains, unfathomably, the object of constant discussion and fascination). Only now has a comprehensive HBO documentary series about the child murders been released… and even this does not seem like enough. It is not easy viewing – nor should it be.
My rambling has little point. What does a frivolity like Ted Danson have to do with something so completely soul-crushing? It’s a keen reminder that the past, whatever it is, is easily forgotten. Some of history’s most heinous events can be entirely lost, particularly if too little note was paid to them in the first place. And it’s an even keener reminder that, as a society, we see only what we want to see and what we are shown. It’s no wonder that we live in most fraught, divided and painful times, when not every life – wrongly – is seen as having the same inherent value.
Giving a Box of Books Away
–Roger MitchellLittle caskets of my former dreams,
I feed you back into the Ganges
of living perceptions, extravagant
longings, that life, no matter how
scattered, buffeted, ridden by floods
of feeling and need, can’t do without.
Let somebody else finish Tasso.
Let somebody else put the citadel
of Plutarch, the shield of Proust
on the shelf above his bed to protect him
from a life without extravagant hope.
My underlinings in Freud, my shouts
in the margins of Dostoyevsky, my first
edition of Goodbye Wisconsin, my
Swap and Go: Home Exchanging
As a Way of Life, as the way of my life
becomes clear and less cluttered,
I set afloat in the sleepy bulrushes
of the delta like a child I couldn’t keep.
Good-bye ambition, good-bye to keeping
around what even memory lets go.
The sea greets us like a long-lost friend
while gigantic mountains of cumulonimbus
collapse and inflate across the sky.
Rifle II
–Rudy FranciscoOn average
the Mexican government
confiscates approximately
38,000 illegal firearms per year.After the guns are taken,
they get dismantled
and the metal is used to make
other types of weapons that will
later be utilized by their military.In 2012,
Pedro Reyes,
an artist from Mexico City,
convinced his government
to donate the guns to himso he could turn them into
musical instruments.So somewhere
there is a tambourine,
a drum set, a guitar,
all made out of things
that were used to take people’s lives,
but now they create a sound
that puts life back into people’s bodies,
which is to say,a weapon will always be a weapon
but we choose how we fight the war,
and from this I learned that even our mostdestructive instruments can still create a melody
worth dancing to
and sometimes isn’t that also called a battle?I wonder how long it took to convince
the first rifle that it could hold a note
instead of a bullet, but still fire into a crowd
and make everyone move.When I was six,
I was taught how to throw a punch,
In the 80s, that was the anti-bullying movement.The first time one of my classmates
took a yo mama joke a little too far,
I remembered all of my training,
I hit the boy in the face,I turned his nose into a fountain.
My fist was five pennies.I closed my eyes,
I made a wish,
I came home with bloody knuckles,
and it was the first piece of
artwork we hung on the fridge.I remember staring at my hands
the same way you stare at a midterm
when all your answers are correct.
I had no idea what class this was
but I did know I was passing
and isn’t that what masculinity has become?A bunch of dudes afraid of their own feelings,
terrified of any emotion other than anger,
yelling at shadows on the wall,
but still haven’t realized
that we’re the ones standing in front of the light.We learn how to dodge a jab,
we learn how to step in before we swing,we learn that the heart is the same size as the fist,
but we keep forgetting they don’t have the same functions.
We keep telling each other to man up
when we don’t even know what that means.We turn our boys into bayonets,
point them in the wrong direction,
pull their triggers and fail to acknowledge
all the damage they are doing in the distance.The word “repurpose”
means to take an object
and give it amnesia.It means to make something forget what
it’s been trained to do so you can
use it for a better reason.I am learning that this body is not a shotgun.
I am learning that this body is not a pistol.
I am learning that a man is not defined
by what he can destroy.I am learning that a person
who only knows how to fight
can only communicate in violence
and that shouldn’t be anyone’s first language.I am learning that the difference between
a garden and a graveyard is only what
you choose to put in the ground.One day,
I came across a picture of a strange-looking violin.
The caption said it was made out of a rifle
and I was like,“someday
that can be me.”
Night Swimming
–Fleda Brown
We are without our men, hers dead
ten years, mine far away, the water
glassy warm. My old aunt already stands
half in. All I see of the white half,
her small old breasts like bells,
almost nice as a girl’s. Then we hardly
feel the water, a drag on the nipples,
a brush on the crotch, like making love
blind, only the knives of light
from the opposite shore, the shudders
of our swimming breaking it up.
We let the water get next to us
and into the quick of losses we don’t
have to talk about. We swim out
to where the dock goes blank,
and we are stranded, abandoned good flesh
in a black of glimmering. We each fit
our skin exactly. After a while
we come out of the water slick as eels,
still swimming, straight-backed,
breasts out, up to the porch,
illuminate, sexy as hell, inspired.
Monument City
–Jared Carter
Muppet Suite
–Jessy Randall1. The Muppets on The Muppet Show
This one’s job
was to yearn.
This one to love improbably.
This one to be pathetic.
This one to run berserk.
None of the jobs were useful
but we did them very well.2. Miss Piggy
I was too big for him.
I gaped open. I know
I disgusted him. But
in secret he loved me.
I was addicted to shame.3. Fozzy Bear
Those jokes I told – I got them
from books. Every one of them,
I stole. I knew you knew.
It was slow suicide, reciting those
stale tomatoes. Mushy. The seeds
black frost on the audience’s applause.4. The Swedish Chef
My exuberance
could kill someone.
I toss my cleavers,
enraptured with language.
I’ll cook for you, eyeless,
illegible, illiterate.5. Gonzo
My name means crazy.
What chance do I have?
But it also means brave.
I’m from farther away
than I’ve ever known.
I’d like to go back there someday.6. The Mahnahmahnah Muppet
I come at it from the side.
That’s the way to make
everyone happy.
I repeat myself, decade
to decade. I never change
in my oddness. I’m a predictable
surprise.7. Crazy Harry and Others
I’m made of explosions.
I get deliberately lost.
I’m singing the whole time.
A letter of the alphabet,
a glyph, a pronouncement.8. Animal
When I call for my mother
you can tell I mean it.
I don’t know a lot of words.
I don’t need them.9. The Muppets on The Muppet Show again
We stand in our compartments, singing.
Our cells have no doors. We are
trapped and free, alone and surrounded.
We’re the new Greek gods.
Even children know our songs.
