Turning Elegy
Leaving is all we have.
It’s your not being here speaking.
Leaving the door ajar, the table
swept—turning into something less
than comfort. What did you have?
Birch is a furious tinder,
burning hot and fast—
we washed our faces with your ash.
Among pine and hemlock—
its white bark shines like
pain or loss—the supple trunk
a white pillar, tree skin—
and its heartwood—
the dark red of cloves.
Turning, I saw it and
my breath stopped.
The Purse
Mother is upstream. She brings me a surprise. The surprise is a purse.
She has the eyes of a flooded river. She steps on small white buttons. She is zippers and clasps.
There is a canal in the center of our house, hidden between two closets. In one closet, bookshelves. In the other, a fortress of hatboxes. This is the scarlet thread.
Mother presses money into my hand like the point of a knife. She fastens a leash of foxes around her neck. On her vanity are powders in canisters, liquids in glass vessels. Mirrors.
She opens her purse. Past its mouth, the insides are crowded with the viscera of a purse. Bobby pins. Needles. A perfume counter of invisible salt. The wooden teeth of escalators and combs. Ceilings. Slain hens in wood cages. Red clay.
When she goes into her purse, I think she will not come back. It is a burning star. It is a mannequin of wire and cotton.
She disappears into a large pale building again. It unclasps to accept her. I was born in that building, across from a cemetery.
I Have The Answers To The Thing From Another World
About Things from another world they were
never wrong, the old filmmakers, how well
they understood the need for a good siege,
camaraderie and fast-paced dialogue,
how to get it all going with a compass
that goes awry, a radio on the blink,
and men fanning out on the polar ice,
arms spread to outline the buried flying saucer.
The eight-foot frozen alien will prove
the smartest space rutabaga ever seen—
sap for blood, thorned knuckles, it re-grows
torn-off limbs, raises an army from spores.
Unlike soldiers, women know vegetables:
you don’t defeat a carrot, you cook it.
A Geiger counter’s tick builds suspense
then a Nobel prize winner too smart
to spot the danger tries to reason
with a potato intent on drinking
men’s blood and taking over the world.
After the thing’s reduced to ash, we’re left
with knowing how easy our displacement
is, how close our obsolescence might be.
Welcome to the ninety-fifties, where fear,
not science, unites us, where thinking
and knowledge open the door to arctic
chills; atomic blasts; sexless, emotionless
Things from foreign worlds. Keep watching the skies!
The slight-of-hand of nothing up the sleeve:
another way of saying pay no attention
to the little man behind the curtain.
Michael Gushue’s books are Sympathy for the Monster, Gather Down Women, Pachinko Mouth, Conrad, The Judy Poems with CL Bledsoe, I Never Promised You A Sea Monkey with CL Bledsoe, and, forthcoming, in collaboration with Kim Roberts, Q&A For The End Of The World.
Feature Image: Bonfire in Another World from Maurits Verbiest from The Hague, The Netherlands, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
