If This Were a Movie, You’d Think It Real by Aleksandar Hemon

If This Were a Movie, You’d Think It Real

 

That which doesn’t have to be named

just keeps being until it’s all undone.

Beyond all that, the world is negotiable

 

and cool, with readjusted coloring,

invisible pain—an ad for a harmless hell.

See the Styrofoam moon in a painted sky,

 

casting no light, just matted reflections,

the stars lurking through the tin-sky holes,

designed in a void that has never moved.

 

But just below, the passing birds, notches

in the night, with news of the cursed tribe

whose stories have no end or beginning,

 

who never lived but must now all be killed.

Cities razed, boats sunk, children drowned,

kindle wood carved from ancient olive trees,

 

shrapnel-shredded bodies in tall heaps.

The birds sing in mourning for the absent

gone unburied, never, nowhere to be found,

 

those who were there or here not so long ago,

asking us: Your name? Where do you come from?

Why are you with us when the others are dead?

 

Memory by Anthony Hecht

Memory

 

Sepia oval portraits of the family,

Black-framed, adorned the small brown-papered hall,

But the parlor was kept unused, never disturbed.

Under a glass bell, the dried hydrangeas

Had bleached to the hue of ancient newspaper,

Though once, someone affirmed, they had been pink.

Pink still were the shiny curling orifices

Of matching seashells stationed on the mantel

With mated, spiked, wrought-iron candlesticks.

The room contained a tufted ottoman,

A large elephant-foot umbrella stand

With two malacca canes, and two peacock

Tail-feathers sprouting from a small-necked vase.

On a teak side table lay, side by side,

A Bible and a magnifying glass.

Green velvet drapes kept the room dark and airless

Until on sunny days toward midsummer

The brass andirons caught a shaft of light

For twenty minutes in late afternoon

In a radiance dimly akin to happiness—

The dusty gleam of temporary wealth.

A Certain Light by Marie Howe

A Certain Light

 

He had taken the right pills the night before.

We had counted them out

 

from the egg carton where they were numbered so there’d be no mistake.

He had taken the morphine and prednisone and amitriptiline

 

and florinef and vancomycin and halcion too quickly

and had thrown up in the bowl Joe brought to the bed—a thin string

 

of blue spit—then waited a few minutes, to calm himself,

before he took them all again. And had slept through the night

 

and the morning and was still sleeping at noon, or not sleeping.

He was breathing maybe twice a minute, and we couldn’t wake him,

 

we couldn’t wake him until we shook him hard calling, John wake up now

John wake up—Who is the president?

 

And he couldn’t answer.

His doctor told us we’d have to keep him up for hours.

 

He was all bones and skin, no tissue to absorb the medicine.

He couldn’t walk unless two people held him.

 

And we made him talk about the movies: What was the best moment in

On The Waterfront? What was the music in Gone With The Wind?

 

And for seven hours he answered, if only to please us, mumbling

I like the morphine, sinking, rising, sleeping, rousing,

 

then only in pain again. But wakened.

So wakened that late that night, in one of those still blue moments

 

that were a kind of paradise, he finally opened his eyes wide,

and the room filled with a certain light we thought we’d never see again.

 

Look at you two, he said. And we did.

And Joe said, Look at you.    And John said, How do I look?

 

And Joe said, Handsome.

  

Continuity by Terrance Hayes

Continuity

 

Before getting into the cab, she hands him a cup.
Then, after they kiss, she hands him the cup again.

As they walk, she hands him a man-made substance.
Then, after they kiss, she hands him the cup again.

She hands him a chalice of lightning
& he hands her a chalice of fire.

Then in the next shot, after they kiss,
They exchange chalices again.

When she goes through the metal detector,
She carefully places a pair of hoop earrings in a plastic tray.

When she retrieves them,
They are two silver bangles she fits to her wrists.

When they climb from the cab in the rain, her hair is wet,
But when they kiss on the sidewalk her hair is dry again.

After she takes off her helmet & breastplate,
& enters the water wearing nothing but courage,

She says to him, “You are nude,
But you must be naked to win.”

Or she says, “To survive you must lay bare
The heart,” according to the closed captions.

When they climb from the river, her hair is a river
Where night has fallen, tangled with twigs & stars,

Parting like a path of escape.
But in the very next shot,

As they climb from the river,
Her hair is braided with wire & string.

When he bangs on the rain-streaked window
Of the cab yelling her name in a pivotal scene,

Briefly reflected in the window in the rain
Tangled with wires & stars above a river

Is the hand of a fan or stagehand or bodyguard,
Body double, bystander, interloper, beloved ghost,

& the two of us watching from a bridge on the far side.

 

To Stammering by Kenneth Koch

To Stammering

 

Where did you come from, lamentable quality?

Before I had a life you were about to ruin my life.

The mystery of this stays with me.

“Don’t brood about things,” my elders said.

I hadn’t any other experience of enemies from inside.

They were all from outside—big boys

Who cursed me and hit me; motorists; falling trees.

All these you were as bad as, yet inside. When I spoke, you were there.

I could avoid you by singing or acting.

I acted in school plays but was no good at singing.

Immediately after the play you were there again.

You ruined the cast party.

You were not a sign of confidence.

You were not a sign of manliness.

You were stronger than good luck and bad; you survived them both.

You were slowly edged out of my throat by psychoanalysis

You who had been brought in, it seems, like a hired thug

To beat up both sides and distract them

From the main issue: oedipal love. You were horrible!

Tell them, now that you’re back in your thug country,

That you don’t have to be so rough next time you’re called in

But can be milder and have the same effect—unhappiness and pain.

Théâtre de l'Odéon by Emily Fragos

Théâtre de l'Odéon

I could not rise from the dark and go out into the cool,

night air of that beautiful city,

could not get on with my conniving, young life.

What had been smooth and good became impossible, slowly,

 

mechanically, placing one foot in front of the next, so that legs,

as if buried in snow, might inch along the river

 

and the alleys with the clochards and the cats,

and I might seem a bright young thing again.

 

And all this before the shock of loss, the dying, who linger

with their weak bodies and blank faces,

 

and my own stupid share of human harm

inflicted upon the innocent,

 

and long before Time, that asp,

started laughing, laughing at me.

Minstrel Man by Langston Hughes

Minstrel Man

Because my mouth

Is wide with laughter

And my throat

Is deep with song,

You did not think

I suffer after

I've held my pain

So long.

 

Because my mouth

Is wide with laughter

You do not hear

My inner cry:

Because my feet

Are gay with dancing,

You do not know

I die.