ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

 
FOUR POEMS
by Gregory Pardlo

Must Be the Music

I plan out a beat juggle because
a beat juggle has to be planned out.
                                   -- DJ Craze

Apothecary of beats
per minute, he knows
what grooves are curative
and combine safely. He doses
the dance floor and the aficionados
crowding the wheels
of steel whose spiraled irises dust
wonderment like skull-hung
disco balls. A cleric of milk crates,
he tables duplicates and executes crossovers
like a concert pianist -- so many, until
he's in touch with the spheres
trapped in the flat aspects of the records,
handles them like black
basketballs hand under
leg, behind back, isolating a single
beat on each, sounding double
dribbles on the hardwood
of an empty gym echo-located
in his mind. He fastens the hooks
of melodies together and brings
the beat back. As if in Dantean
persecution, his machinery revolves
while he snatches fractions
of seconds from the fader switch
like a board-side timer
for a speed-chess match. He dials back
the drum and bass to circadian
counterpoint, headset shouldered
the way a safecracker might,
gives two turns right,
once left 'til a high hat wets
a griddle and the grooves of the single
cut on the twelve-inch record, wide-
furrowed for fidelity and bass, orbit
the spindle like an asteroid belt that
the needle, a Ouija's planchette,
channels a grainy message from. The message
is a magnet, pendulous above the crowd
dancing tidal and iron-gray in the slow grope
of the spotlight, exalting them tautologically
to throw their hands in the air,
wave them.



Suburban Noir

Seed crushed. Husk broken. The game unwon
with heads hung low. Turf turned over and cleated,
the bleachered field, en-fenced, is empty,
sidelines littered with orange peels and puddling
mounds of ice. The good games have all been spoken.
Car doors and the commerce of women with profiles

uplit by taillights and the saplings lining islands
pinwheel leaves like banner wedges strung along
a dealer's lot where late skateboards abrade the blacktop,
bank and glide like tumbling kites bellying off a last
stratum of air with a kick-step; the rise into silence
and the fall to earth, each rampless lift an undressing,

an uncinching of gravity's saddle and the garment
let go. Electric sea-water ripples rec-room windows
in the background through the compound dark
of pine grove and sun down. Beneath a flood light,
a dog's bark breaks across the school's cinder block wall
where a goal is painted, into which a boy percusses

an endlessly relived penalty kick. Phone poles stake
taut strings through eyelets in the blue tarpaulin
night lifting lightly at the edges. Condensation
gambols in the light's slanted dowels, chills
the air against his bare legs.



Man Reading in Bed by a Window With Bugs

-- a second floor window, darkened
but for a single lamp,
winged insects creep through a rift
in the screen as if seeking asylum
on the lamp's damp skiff of light.
the cicada's reporting ticker-tape
seems to augur a storm and a frayed cordage
of willow branch blanches in accord
and the brook nods, applauds. the book
is a cat in his lap as he nods
off and leaks through the frayed
screen down to where, in affection,
arches the tall grass the wind
strokes as oak leaves leather
in the yellow porch light and shine
dully. he sets off, each step toward the open
sounds like the turning of a page.
when the breeze wakes him he shuts the window,
still imagining himself shirtless in the field.
each pore is a teat, he thinks, each teat a socket
the night plugs in to power its calamine
miner's lamp. before turning up
the covers, he shuts the book and shuts
the light, skin singing of invisible wings.



In Canal Street Station Late

at night I stand alone along the lonely platform pew
overlooking rodents ghosting sediment and slipping
through fractures in the monochrome reel
of filth the tracks, frame by frame, display.
The station announcer's voice
conjures the anima of bags in garbage cans.
Trickles sound icily from the city's
untidy veins. Blear-eyed and unsteady,
mice to me flit faint as water-
sliders, could well be those dimpling insects
that darted against the surface of my backyard
pool blown over with leaves, needles, cut grass.
And where is my old mower now
with its sneezing two-stroke engine
and tattered grass-catch that once culled
a nest of wasps through its brutal centrifuge?
It should be in the shed beside snow shovels,
beside the woodpile bejeweled with spider eggs.
The evening streaked orange and blue.
Fluorescent green of my canvass yard shoes.
Crane flies, outside the shed door, hung within
the maw of the mulberry eaves beside a paper
lantern shifting easy in the breeze. Breath quickens
in the tunnel like a throat trembling with light.
The conductor skippers a list of caution when the train
arrives. Doors peel a toothless yawn where men sleep
lengthwise on benches and I think of mice snuggled
in the mouths of reptiles. Afford me some pity, dear Nessie
of halogen and steel, your sub-street tempest sparking
moments blind and shuddering with caprice
like a wet dog. Your maps are like x-rays where I am circled
and incriminated like a tumor. But we are kin. In me, too,
a prisoner contemplates escape, scrapes memory like soft stone
at night and daily drags a tin cup along my cage of rib bones.