ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

 
THREE POEMS
by Maggie Balistreri

Stop Saying Surreal

It was the lucky ones who fled
Tower Two. Another plane overhead

and bodies too, as they leapt
to their deaths. We wept
to see shoes outstepped

forgone for bare feet
that slap Church Street
long since profaned. Dustsheet

concrete soot and ash.
Duck debris and photoflash.
Photogenic plane crash

replays on news
from each angle; different views
of this misnamed horror; folks use

the word surreal!
Stop saying surreal.

It was utterly real.
That's the horror. It was real.



Still

Unassailable slumberer
How we crept in your presence!
A sin to wake a sleeping man, kids knew;
kids knew of consequences.
The perverse mystery of snoring:
rousing all but its producer. Fatigue,
a weapon you could wield:
Fatigue trumps vigor,
Crowns you silent victor.
How often noisy sleep
stilled our house       our limbs       our mouths.
So many rooms untrammeled
till the sleeping one awoke.
Kids counted minutes,
darted eyes past all those surfaces
squandered by imposed stillness:
Surfaces meant to jump from,
drag racecars on,
bounce sound against.
Sounds and shifts
trapped in piston bodies
waiting for release.
Reflexes postponed.
Kids learned to postpone,
To be still.
To be still second-guessing
consequences of motion.
To be still premeditating the cost of impulse.
The gain: a saint's composure.
The loss: still counting.



Engagement

He said the woman he married
had to have four qualities:
intelligence, beauty, dignity, and

he was too drunk to remember the fourth.
I was sober enough to be intrigued.
I took a guess at the last quality: "Funny?"

He shot me a look that made me doubt my own intelligence.
"If she's intelligent, she is funny," he said,
which attests to his own intelligence.

I'm not one to belabor an issue (dignity),
and besides, I was confident I could figure it out
on my own (intelligence). But I never did,

and now he's marrying someone else,
and if I had lacked the dignity
to think I had the beauty,

I might have lasted long enough
to ask what I should hope to have
that he's since found in another.