|
WTC Special Living in the Falling Apart as Gathering the Storm . . . |
| . | . |
Tempest Edwin Torres Living in the Falling Apart Elaine Schwager The White-Throated Sparrow Can't Compare Eleanor Wilner Black Balloons Roger Bonner This Earth Place (R.R. Photo 2) Fortune Telling L. Sherwood Rudish The Mouths of Golden Fish Familia Sagrada Vicki Hudspith The Widest River Kate B. Benedict Freud and H.D., 1933 Kill Them All Aimée Walker In the Days After Yasmin Dalisay Vigil Britt Schoonebeek Ladder: Chartres, '42 Alexis Quinlan The Bardo Realm (Essay) Diane Travers A Tornado of Birds (Fiction) *** Terrence Dunn |
 "Metal Soldiers" Photo: © 2001 Rochelle Rattner |
| . | . |
~ . ~ Tempest Edwin Torres We will storm our planes on you. —Osama bin Laden everyone will feel better hearing what you are saying since what you are saying no one told you to say everyone will feel better hearing what you are saying since what you are saying no one told you to say a number of people have gathered and stopped for whatever it takes to say what you say a number of people have gathered and stopped for whatever it takes to say what you say something is happening that hasn't been seen making what happens the opposite of seeing something is happening that hasn't been seen making what happens the opposite of seeing saying what there is in a time like now means never knowing time if time can be right saying what there is in a time like now means never knowing time if time can be right it is your job to witness your world to tell who will listen so they listen like you it is your job to witness your world to tell who will listen so they listen like you we will storm you with words you will have an entire ocean we will make you our raindrop you will have no umbrella we will teach you our water you will drown in our words we will give you an ocean you will swim in our wash we will make you our rain you will have no umbrella we will water your ocean you will drown in our words we will swim in your storm you will rain in our ocean we will teach you our water you will drown in our words
~ . ~ Living in the Falling Apart Elaine Schwager Death is nearby, breathing where life doesn't, sure in the dark downturn, the rush of no control. Life is stripped of wanting us. We are suddenly undesirable, fattened with poor man's faith and rich man's sweets, ignored by what we believed in. Suddenly, we only want to be caressed in the way we caress by other than what we think to be a thought in a silence we wander into thoughtless. We, the outside, like night is outside a star's-two faced profile, watching old light twinkle—a reminder that universes have their life spans too. There could be an end to the desire to find a metaphor to describe something horrifying beautifully. Then beauty and horror would end. And there'd be nothing stopping anything, just we outside like night is outside a star's two-faced profile believing this is an interesting place to find oneself, this end that is wider than whatever was out there till now. ~ . ~ The White-Throated Sparrow Can't Compare Eleanor Wilner —for Tony Hoagland He had made it through so many winters, an optimist in the blizzard's heart, staying on— so it seemed wrong, unfair (if such a word has any currency), that the gray expanse that used to mean the rain of spring should be the solid metal of a sky in motion overhead, and nowhere for a small and singing thing to fly, now that the bombers had come back, a phalanx overhead, a Roman legion given wings, and the land below grown dark— the way a shadow slips across the land when a cloud passes overhead. But there resemblance ends. As does ours with the sparrow, who, resting on a shaded branch, shakes his wings and gives the clear, reflective whistle for which his kind is known. But now the very thought of him has flown; the mind can't hold for long the sparrow and the bombers in a single thought. Mad to make them share a line, as if to balance power so unequal on the creaking fulcrum of the merest and: a pennyworth of weight with its live, pensive song against a roaring overhead—pure dread, its leaden tonnage, and its tongue. —Spring 2001 (By permission of The Drunken Boat.). ~ . ~ Roger Bonner its tears are black balloons falling on the ground where blue and silver are colours of pain of death and the sun is a pot of ash. The child wants to cling but the trees run away to hide behind hills where flowers clatter in the wind. The child screams as again and again, in a glaring loop, great knives cut into coils making the towers tumble on its bed. The child draws furiously, its small hands clenching crayons, and in reds, greens, yellows it draws, draws angels swarming in the sky like crows. (By permission of The Drunken Boat.) ~ . ~ This Earth Place Laura Sherwood Rudish The people in the rubble Are all dead now It's the rest of us who are In fragments Broken and burned Fallen Still Something gleams From a sunflower's center Infinite Star upon star With wounds and Tears everywhere Water, candles, gas masks, gold? How The spirit desecrates What we try to make whole —September 2001  "Masks" Photo: © 2001 Rochelle Rattner Fortune Telling Laura Sherwood Rudish Spread the tarot cards on the bed. Don't let the dog distract, don't Let her nose a damp card from the deck. What kind of fortune finds us here? No one's left who can remember. Outside this room the whole world glows. October sifting over grasses. Even now, with things uncanny, All our friends seem so untouched: Singing to the car radio, eating lunch. ~ . ~ The Mouths of Golden Fish Vicki Hudspith Morning travels fastest earliest Before confusion And the strain of focusing On every street corner These are things to know If you leave, you will be blamed For the fumes of my derision in open water Where I float O I can be so very remote Just a tiny pinpoint in a faraway lens It may be a bird landing But perhaps it will be me and the sound of heat Such a pleasant mountain of rice upon my plate A yeoman's portion but without hunger for The bath of sunlight I sought for sleep To dream so many times of home But not remember where I kept the chair Or what to say to the raven-haired girl The edges were crisp with fear And the sickness of war The fabric of which was blue Or what passed as noon Wrapped around sandstorms the color of night An atonal clinking of brass castanets Delirious with future computer written Arabic Caught in the sharpness of sun And singing dropped from a glottal cliff Rushed by like water trembling Or a kiss that admires nothing but the heart As it beats against the vowels in my neck And won't negotiate With carbons and engines and global boo hoo Pushed them aside like a curtain covered in points of light Empathy no doubt is a wonderful thing Anointed in pride Then left to dry While the sun alleviates a skin of lies And bakes the pleasant brain dry But once the nets have fallen The beach lies scattered with my entire life And it will play across your eyes As you fill your cut open pockets with incidentals Then press your lips to the mouths of golden fish And fall as though slain against the tile in a bathroom Of some cheesy discotheque in Northern Spain It descends like a fever of language In a cover of words And releases through the terrible smoke Of a thousand miles Into the gambit of exhaustion Under a fierce desert moon Where I stand among the nomads To begin this frightening life ~ . Familia Sagrada Vicki Hudspith The days are marked by taking night Everything repetitive dulls the shine If only the sky wasn't filled with sand Mirages of 2,000 men on camelback Riding over the next crest like elegant primeval geniuses With eyes that beg you to take care of them While exuding a declining air A girl likes the challenge of someone else's dream Bad water and colic Corners around which years revolve In complete sentences days collapse The horizon to relinquish its most vibrant colors The desert loves the disturbance of being human Though it is the humor of gods which are lasting adornments For the guy whose eye you want to catch There are risks involved in safety Steps seven, eight, nine In preparation for failure and the passing of midday Weather turns against logic While you must stay In the tents of the desert mafia watching tribes fade away Led into midnight's headwind Where there are no avenues And the twirling ballerinas are sand tunnels rising For that must happen too And you would like to stay but inbred agitation mounts And before the morning is half gone you say good bye And see regret flash in his eye Because you have only one bag and these old jeans The low physics of sand brushes your leg And you get in a truck moving West For the East has closed itself And you know that at least when you know nothing else An odd kind of music swelling around your eyes And when you close them Sleep fans you with perfumed skirts of cotton The bread and kernels of wise men still caught in your sleeve Protects you against beggars and love's thieves Clicking like a mountain of pistachio shells you once ate in a café And the dates and halvah and pomegranate kisses Filled the night air with altitude sickness You saw no other travelers and went solo because that was right Tattooed with fallen shells Which had rolled beneath your skin as you slept And you knew everything at once When you lay your head on the parcel called home Bundled it but forgot it in the morning of dissonance and air For these were the temporary conditions Of letting the heavens come so near ~ . ~ The Widest River Kate Bernadette Benedict It's the Seine, if you're in it, if you've bounded off the Pont du Carrousel to save a drowning woman and strong currents pull you in the wrong direction and your saturated clothing, your fine worsteds and silks, make each stroke and kick a difficult toil. You don't feel like a hero at all but like a victim, a victim of that careless woman who has fallen in or jumped, who might grab your ankles at any moment and haul you down into in the filthy, frigid water. How angry she makes you— but then you remember her surprised white face as it went under, it's your beacon, and you press on. Later that night, at the Embassy banquet, you will try to kill the taste of river water with fine smokes and wine and say nothing of the rescue. So it is with the reticence of heroes and so their exploits go. In the cancer ward, a nurse wipes off a patient's vomit though he flails at her with a violence and she's sickened by the smell. In the twin tower, a fireman climbs toward the 80th floor, wanting to be anywhere else, anywhere but in that narrow stairwell with his deep bone's ache and his burdensome equipment. Whether he does the job well today or recklessly, he may live; whether he forgets himself or pities himself, he may die as Eugen Boissevain might have died but instead he lived, to tell us, by and by, of how on the night of the Embassy banquet he sprinted from the haven of his limousine and leapt into the pestilential Seine, of what a nuisance it was to be gallant, what a drudgery and bother, and of how, if it came to it, he would save that nameless woman's life again. ~ . ~ Freud and H.D., 1933 Aimée Walker Seeing his small Athena, the tripod from the walls of Corfu returns… Whose god is it shows me these images? I must transcribe, but under which star? Morning or evening? Egyptian or Greek? The Jew tells me it should not matter; on his couch it does not. I tell him, in love, it is the same. It is not the form or shape of things but the worlds beneath those bodies. My master replies, No. Biologically speaking… But I know it is true. Staring at the forms on his desk, the statue of Androgyny comes to mind. It is true that the god in her is the god in him, the god in Egypt is the god in Greece, as it is in the old Jew and me, the pagan Christian. ~ . Kill Them All Aimée Walker Grandma asks me to drop the bomb, kill them all. I was there. I know the screaming. She sifts her paper trying to find the Bowery poem— the depression, her factory job, how it was, a new Jewish immigrant years before they swept the place clean. We weren't clean enough we didn't shout handcuff beat kill enough— and they got us. I feel, in my blood, her hate, German lust we share for vengeance. I want to draw it out, drop by drop, till I am calm. This is not the past coming up, Grandma. Hirschberg is not bubbling. This is something crashing down— a different fear. Different? It is always the same, it is always Ira, lying in the snow, covered in glass at my feet, me looking for help and finding only blond boys with swastikas. ~ . ~ In the Days After Yasmin Dalisay The juice man chips ice. Sparks of it flicker on the sidewalk. At the curb, water and grease pool in an opaque glaze. A woman wheels a cart with mangoes on sticks, each one carved like an artichoke, soft leaves edged in mango skin. It is September, and this day looks like last year, the air maybe sharper. I exhale. An immigrant, I cling to this city even as it burns. As ash whitens my window panes, juice drips on fingers, fruit still ripens into sweetness, and money goes from hand to hand. ~ . ~ Vigil Britt Schoonebeek A half-mast flag flaps in the near distance. Its rope shivers around the pole, folding new knots and rifts; unsure of its strength to hold, like a candle crying its skin into the street. Nothing here but hard wax, red eyes, and the sniffles that drift into anonymous questions with clouds in the still, staring sky. A long trail of low light travels across the lake and almost whisks the flag into the wind where nothing lifts. Questions flutter with the steady pulse of flames flying far away from here. —September 2001 ~ . ~ . ~ |
