Observations

Closet Poets - Part V

“White Line”
By Justin Lerner

While all strut leisurely,
One darts down the pavement and stops with a crash
To stare over the glass barricade,
Sniffing railings,
Looks up and arches his back, opens his mouth
As if to shout at the futuristic-want-to-be
Silver and window-y complex,
Yet his voice does nil—
He moves his neck with haste
Back to the railing,
Scans it left to right as if it is a
Glazed turkey
Or a good leg
Or whatever they’re having.

All the while an onlooker sits on a tall concrete something
That was not meant to be a stool
(I say as if we are not all in silent agreement that almost anything goes here.
Almost. Meaning you can do anything, or try to do anything, except for that thing.),
But he sits nonetheless
And takes one, two glances at this being while he does his best
To stare at the beautiful navy blue road
With newly painted white dividers that separate the cars
And, of course, the buildings. The buildings of something,
The signs of something. Whatever they may be,
He knows he can see dreams. He sees them in each follicle of hair
on every stroller. He’d love to see their minds too,
But the railing sniffer hopped up and started spinning rapidly
Like a helicopter,
Flailing his arms through the crowd without hitting a single one.
Not a single one was affected.

“Perception”
By Justin Lerner

Dear pigeon, hustling as it should—you
are a New Yorker, after all,
With your color-gradient collar and your slick grey suit—
Do you become more graceful when you’re a “rock dove”?
Do people abandon your position as a sky rat in favor
Of your strength as “rock”? Or perhaps your beauty as “dove”?
Do you hop up the ranks in your closet to exchange your collar and suit
For a flowing silk robe?

Or maybe even when you’re a “rock pigeon,”
Still a rat but stronger,
Do you fly around the local sports clubs, planet fitness,
Or perhaps the $250-per-month clubs that seem to be a planet of their own?

Do people stop you for an arm-wrestling contest
(because, after all, you are “rock”), laughingly,
High-fiving you as they speed on with their day?
Do you weight-train with folks outside of Penn waiting
For their own train?

And it scares me to ask—it does—what happens when you are a “common pigeon.”
Common as the gum-stained concrete tread on
By thousands of jet-stream engines zooming to their
Next unknown, mysterious, e x c l u s i v e, escapades.
Do you merge with the sidewalk? Are you a thumbtack on
Their leather office chair? Do you dare
Fly within a foot of their leather-shoed
Manicured foot?

This I wonder,
rock dove
rock pigeon
common pigeon,
As I watch you go about your day like everyone else,
In your beautiful collar and tailored suit.

“Masking Matters”
By Annette M. Magid

I took some time to make face masks.
As an experienced amateur sewer, I
had many yards of perfect fabric to
make the masks. I had a working machine
to sew the masks. Thread to even match
the fabric. I studied the mask-making on
line. Even Colbert had an actor make a
mask with a bandana. I downloaded a
suitable pattern suggested by an expert
seamstress. Following directives from
a local hospital, I made the masks with
light and dark fabric. I even found proper
elastic for ear loops in my notion collection.
I called the local nursing homes and hospitals
And found that there was an agency that
They used to make the masks, so I contacted
The mask-making agency online and they
Told me that they only sewed the masks
When they were doing it together, bringing
Their machines to a large space so they
Could safely sew together. Being an at-risk
Person, I did not want to do that, so I
Called my family and friends and offered
My masks to them and all of my sewing
Enabled my friends and family to stay
Safer and hopefully remain well.

“Teacher’s Art”
By Annette M. Magid

I have been schooled
To teach school students
So that somehow they
Be born to selves.

And I again, in their learning
Grow smarter, so to
sew and paint wiser
Thought as a master
Stroking back-washed board.

Applying film layers
Barely discernable.
Attempting to produce a
Finished masterpiece.

“A Spell on the Bus—the Pandemic Episode”
By Liyang Dong

The lurch on the bus thrashed me,
My head was still shuttling forward.
Each abrupt stop was a hand tugging my neck like a puppet.
Perhaps I am one.

A long day’s teaching, armed like a warrior to the battlefield,
Surgical mask layered with N95, goggles, hat, sanitizer, alcohol spray;
Lack of sleep, but commitment to students and school held me through
Like a stubborn bull.

Rumbling thunder, bursting gray clouds,
A dehydrated pomegranate bobbing and cowering on an empty bus.
A bus most feared to take for the viruses and germs it might carry.
Difficult to breathe, hypnotized, my droopy eyes landed on the graveyard near my stop.

My heart grew heavy and weary for these eternal sleepers, my neighbors.
I always wondered about the reason for their demise,
What broken hearts and lost souls they left behind.
Now they cringe at making space for 183,690 more COVID martyrs.

“Tarot and an Italian American Girl on Long Island”
By Carmela Delia Lanza

CARMELA DELIA LANZA

“Will I have children?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“That is not what the cards say.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
And maybe I didn’t,
at 15 years old, what did I know?
Sitting on that polyester rug
in the living-room,
just another sweaty summer day,
and there was nothing else to do.
Days of looking at cards,
sitting too close to a fan,
killing a spider on the wall that just crawled out of nowhere,
why was I counting the days until summer when we ended up,
skin stuck to that worn out chair,
reading a magazine or a book,
was that when I was listening to
Carole King?
“Will you still love me tomorrow?”
There was no one there anyway,
only another day of cards.

Years later, I sit in my kitchen
and he says, “Put those cards away
before you hurt someone.”
Too late for that.
Five of Cups,
that’s me standing over those
cups on the ground, spilled blood,
and I don’t see what is behind me,
the two cups there,
possibly waiting to offer me a way out.

But I had to find my own way out
and it wasn’t going to be pretty.
The silence on our street often felt
like a choking, just hearing the noise of the fan or the television.
My mother watching her afternoon shows,
hours going by, day in and day out.
Then it was time for her to make
some dinner, and that meant calling me in, my sister in, “Do the dishes” or “Wash the salad.”
Sleepy, almost in a dream state,
“What’s wrong with you?”

“She doesn’t know what she is doing.
She told me I won’t have any kids.”
What did I know?
I was looking in a book for the meanings of the cards,
but she was my future sister-in-law’s sister and I had to be nice.
They laughed at me and started whispering,
what did she know, anyway.

I brought the cards to my friend,
living in Delaware,
house, husband, children,
she even stopped working,
she introduced me to David Bowie when we were running around in
Deer Park High School, creating a
secret language, listening to “Rebel, Rebel” again and again.
no one cared about us, no one looked at us,
and then later she talked to me about poetry and “Aguirre the Wrath of God”
and she loved this guy who claimed he was a warlock, stealing her soul away and she kept wanting him to take more.
But here in the Delaware house, the Nine of Pentacles appears,
it is no longer the time when “songs are like tattoos,”
the lady in her robe, one hand gentle on a pentacle,
the other a place for her bird,
it was all hers:
the castle, the garden, the ground she stood on,
“why do I get that card?
Why don’t I get a card about spirituality or selfless love?
Why this?”
I took my spilled cups
and stopped talking.

Now I cannot tell a story
with the characters in conflict,
and I become the poster girl for
the 1970s, there is no story of
a drunk father or a mother who abandoned us.
In my parents’ house,
in the place I cried in for years
starting with right after I was born,
I had to create myself,
whatever I was doing,
trying to write a song,
trying to start a band,
I did not want to go to college,
but I did.
Everyone around me wanted to be safe,
so we made our safe choices,
growing old at 17 years old.
This one is going to be a banker,
this one a diplomat,
this one an English teacher,
It was time to get serious.

And that was when I lost it,
the boy everyone believed I would marry,
the plan to move to New York
and become an actress,
I sat in my quiet small office,
studying literature,
losing it all.

Now I wander in this desert,
an old woman now,
the safe choices have moved in,
following me around for years,
the cards piled in boxes,

I begin to open them all
as if I am losing the skin
of all those years,
why did I get that card?
why me?

“Nantucket Island, 1971”
By Trisha M. Cowen

Karla stands at the end
of the docks in the quiet repose
of pre-dawn,
her breath like corked wine,
waiting for Marcella
to appear from beyond
the breakwater in her husband’s
         barnacle-spotted
     sailboat
from the mainland.

Meet me just before sunrise
she’d said, unraveling Marcella’s
mermaid hair, wild
and silver, smelling of lavender and salt-water,
out of a tight braid.
We will go where they can’t
make us feel like fish
out of water. Urchins
at low tide. Sea stars
in a glass aquarium.

Karla studies the shoreline,
stripped down
in low tide. The sun
is a closet door
                        opened.
Herring gulls, swathed in an
other-worldly glow, deal out Darwin’s
justice, eyeing the pockmarked
sand for the heretics,
the queer nonconformists,
the half-dead bodies that bleed
clandestine fantasy
of an underwater world
that surges, swells with high tide.

The morning fog,
Coral aflame,
dangles over the sand
like the legs of
                   jellyfish
                             floating
     midair.

From the burning fog,
the upper-portion of a
woman’s body emerges
from a low-cresting wave.
The sea nymph lifts her
body onto a rock, her
silver hair loose,
braided in fog and orange-hued
sea-spray.

Worlds away,
a barnacle-covered boat
bobs, unmoored, while
                        Marcella sinks,
sitting on a wooden chair that rocks, humming to
arrest the sea witch’s poison—razor sharp legs
for your perfectly perfect tail.
The crib calls her name,
the one her pretty husband
dreamed in as a pretty child,
the crib, like her womb, lies empty,
a white picket fence around the borders
of his affection—no anchor
to his house; she spins
in a feverish sea as the witch brews
Prometheus’s fire and the embers of sea stars
die under a veil.

The sea witch bellows:
Give me your tongue,
your unborn children,
your pretty little voice,
for love,

                        eternal.
Karla runs to the sea’s mouth
made of teeth and bone, as
herring gulls swarm like
a sea-storm.

She wails
                        Marcella! Marcella!
Years of silence ignite a match
she’d carried in her throat,
in her lips and breasts and squeezed fists.
Her voice is a lighthouse,
a song for ghost ships. At sea, the song
sounds like holding hands, like the murmured
arpeggio of meteors during a
shower. The staccato notes also sound
like gun shots.

The shadow of a sea nymph turns and dives,
swimming deeper and deeper into
                        herself.
The message in her bottle
shatters on the shore where
it will be thrashed
to sea glass
until it’s nothing but
a tiny speck of sand and sea foam,
mortar for some perfect sand castle
in the sky.

“Nantucket Island, 2018”
By Trisha M. Cowen

Karla sits on the beach at high noon,
the tide hungry and still rising,
wearing a flamingo-embossed housedress,
the daily paper’s legs spread wide
above her, eclipsing the sun.

The obituaries,
the only section she still
brings herself to read
since the election,
lies open before her,
the pornographic measure
of the words defibrillate her
with familiar names of
first kisses and playground pests,
each recognition a reminder
of her own impending
demise.

It is there she reads the name
and sucks her breath.
                                    Marcella
            Her
                        Marcella
survived by a husband,
Jack; and daughters, two;
granddaughters, four;
great granddaughters, six—
so many women.

So many women
                        fade
into the kaleidoscopic wallpaper
of their ancestral homes
while others
                        dissipate
unnoticed under the neon cat-eyes
of Times Square.
So many women
                        expire
without a whisper
in body
                        or mind;
gays more ghost
than beating and bleeding
hearts,
even on Main Street
of Provincetown,
where gays have ghettoized,
made the margin mainstream.
Still in 2018—
despite prop 8—
            parades
                  and pride
just aren’t enough
from stopping
girls from disguising
pronouns in love poems or
boys from swinging
from their necks in closets,
for maggots don’t discriminate.
There’s enough space in
the closed casket
but not enough in the world.
They are God’s outcasts,
sons and daughters
of Cain,
                        monsters
to be slain.

Marcella’s obituary,
an epic elegiac, her death bard,
filled with thrilling intrigue.
Her body lost for seven days,
found floating on the sea,
in a sailboat, barnacle-covered,
the sails moth-eaten.
The tide washed her up 
on Nantucket at noon during
tourist season, the only season
Karla avoids, with its sun-blocked worshippers,
caked in masks of white.
The beachgoers marvel
at Marcella’s long silver hair,
wild and braided
in green weed.
To them, she is a castle,
a glittering relic of tradition,
an aged underwater queen,
a fairytale classic for their daughters.

Karla hesitates, refuses to read
their manufactured moral
of Marcella’s last voyage.
When she closes her eyes,
Marcella’s lavender lips linger
on her neck, where the ghost-beats of her
heart measure out the remaining
notes of her life.

A sorrow blooms
in Karla’s throat like high tide with nowhere to go.
She’s unable to swallow as she watches
two young women on the dock in the
distance embrace. The taller woman
wraps her arms around a
woman whose
                               belly bulges.
            The photographer
snaps and directs, granting permission
to display public affection.
Rainbow skeletons
of coral reef, thousands of miles away,
are bleached white as the temperature
ascends in crescendo,
the change so steady and gradual
the beach’s backbone breaks
unnoticed,
the cancer’s song so familiar
we recite the chorus.

Her phone vibrates.
The pocket of her housedress
sends the flamingoes, harpooned
to the fabric, dancing.
The phone she carries for
heart attacks, strokes, falling planes,
  rages.

“Presidential alert:
This is a test of the National
Emergency alert system.
No action is needed.”

She reads it again:
“No action is needed.”

She drops the paper into the hungry tide,
its saliva-covered fingers reaching farther and farther
   up the beach.
The water bleeds
out the words,
the name,
     Marcella,
the salt burning the marrow.

She lays down,
her back bleeding into soft sand
and sea foam, born from stinging shells
and sharp sea glass.

Today the sand is soft
and the sun is warm.

No action is needed.