ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

 
THREE POEMS
by Steven Cordova

Late Nineties Noir

Some guys got a view of Central Park, the Empire State Building.
                         I got a view of a cemetery.
It takes up most of the north side
             of 2nd Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues.
The trees and the markers in the cemetery -- they line up,
                         like pallbearers. The tall spiked bars of the gate
are painted black, and the plaque reads "New York Marble Cemetery."

One night, after a downfall,
            I saw these fireflies there. He saw them too.
We used to kiss, him, me, hard;
                      so hard his eyes rolled green into the dark of his head.
Afterward, we'd talk about how he'd seen the fireflies too.
           and about what he did, or didn't do, for a living.
He said he found stuff and put it together in pictures.
                      It must have been art
he didn't make a living at --
           every time I saw him he was in baggy army pants,
and a v-necked white tee shirt. His dark blond hair
                       was always cropped, though, and even
if it was just $25 a year he forked over
           to some city gym, he forked it over.
You could see mounds of muscle right
                       through the baggy pants and shirt,
mounds that stretched out into plains.

Then he'd have to up and leave. He had this thing,
            with his lover. They could sleep with other guys,
but he had to stop with me. We became more than sex.
                         That's what he said anyway.

I say "anyway"
              because I told a pretty boy about my guy at a party.
The trees in Central Park were twisting
                        behind Pretty Boy, in the dark, in a window.

Pretty Boy says,
            "Yeah, I think I know the guy you're talking about."
"Yeah?"
                       "Yeah," he says, "but his lover's been gone, a long time."

Don't get me wrong. I don't believe every thing I hear,
           especially from the likes of a pretty boy
who can't stop at a drink, or eight or nine.

Still and all, I have to say we did go at each other
                          like two guys on the run, my guy and me.
We were angry mixed with sad mixed with no regrets.
                We were hoping, maybe,
hoping the more friction we made going at each other,
                        the more we'd keep death away,
the way my cat kept away. He was scared,
             that cat, flared-tail scared
he'd get the heel of my guy's leg, or the palm of my flailing hand.

Or maybe we thought
                       that with all that was black
and all that was blue between guys like us in the last twenty years,
            what's a little more black, a little more blue.
We weren't hoping out loud. We weren't thinking
                    out loud. Fireflies -- they don't ask
why they're circling over the dead,
               why they're burning themselves out
after a downfall. They just do.




That Big Noise

Dawn -- and not God? -- wedges a space, opens a door to
another day. And in that moment, for less than a
moment, you hear yourself -- snoring! -- and feel
betrayed. You think: that big noise I make all day lets
itself out? That big noise -- the one that lets itself be
heard, that lets itself be seen only in the liquid motion of
eyes -- that noise has a lot to say: I bring a cargo, it
drones, of food, and drink; I bring this bloody thing I've
hurt, but look! it growls and whines, it's still alive. In this
snort, this whistle and lip-smack, everything I've ever
read, seen, heard … is reaching up, an om-like chant.

                                      Before you can go on too much
longer, the pillow would, if it could, tell you to shut up,
to get up and get ready. No One's listening, it would say,
and I've soaked it all up -- babe, I've soaked it all up.




Poem Beginning with the Line
"A Chicken and an Egg are Having Sex"

A chicken and an egg are having sex;
the chicken feathery, even on his back,
but with no self-consciousness about the feathers;
the egg smooth with not one sign of the nick
that betrays the razor, the stubble
that suggests the kiss of wax.

Chicken may wish Egg laughed at his jokes,
his awkward, awkward clucking,
that Egg did not just lie there rolling from side
to side though its rolling is so vulnerable --
what, with no arms to stop itself, no wings to flap --
and its rolling may be the motion if not the sound

of laughter. Egg, for its part, is grateful.
Chicken does not comment
on its -- the egg's -- indeterminate sex
which -- Egg is no fool -- may just be a man
getting what he can, where he can and when.
But there are worse things than being needy.

Who knows this better than one
who must be sat on? The chicken rolls
out of the sand bed, and walks away clucking something
under his breath. Egg, unbroken, but broken, lies there,
says nothing, knowing Chicken will be back,
not caring, for now, which came first.