by David Lehman
4
The pile contains 771,002 pounds of graphite, 80,590 pounds of uranium oxide, 12,412 pounds of uranium metal, and took seventeen days to build. At 3:49 Fermi orders the control rods removed. At 3:53 he shuts the reaction down. It produced a half watt of energy, not enough to flicker a bulb, but the neutron intensity doubled every two minutes.
5
The guard stood aside, the eye in his hand
flinched, I lowered my head,
when I crossed that threshold
I was back in childhood, a swing rocked,
a red ball bounced, the little ones
were jumping rope and chanting
the numbers, holy names
that stand for nothing except themselves.
Thorium is sequenced from that song,
radium and the transuranic elements.
Once or twice they clapped.
Then it was night, my father called me home,
by no name or voice, just darkness.
from The Manhattan Review
TANYA OLSON
* * *
54 Prince
There exist 54 Goldilocks planets
54 planets not too hot
54 planets not too cold
54 planets where the living
is juuuuuust right
in that particular planetary zone
54 planets like Earth
but not Earth Similar
not the same 54 planets close
but different Different
except for Prince
Assless Pants Prince
High-Heel Boots Prince
Purple Rain Prince
Paisley Park Prince
I Would Die For You Prince
Ejaculating Guitar Prince
Jehovah’s Witness Prince
Needs A New Hip Prince
Wrote Slave On His Face Prince
Took An Unpronounceable Symbol For His Name Prince
Chka Chka Chka Ahh Prince
54 planets each with a Prince
and every Prince
exactly the same
as the one we know on Earth
54 lace 54 canes
54 planets 54 Prince
These 54 Prince swallow 54 worries
The 54 worries become 54 songs
54 songs made of 54 bars 54 bars
using 54 chords 54 downbeats
where they pick up the worries
54 offbeats to lay the worries down again
54 worried skank-beat Prince
birth 54 worrisome funk-drenched songs
Once an Earth year the Prince
gather around Lake Minnetonka
When the cherry moon smiles
they thrust under their heads
Under the water the Prince sick up
the old worries Under the water
worry sacks rise empty again
It takes a worried man the Prince say
to sing a worried song
while beneath the surface of Lake Minnetonka
the perch in the shoals
and the gobies in their holes
nibble at the worries
our skimmed from the top worries
scraped from the bottom worries
spooned from the middle good enough worries
There’s worries now the fish sing
but there won’t be worries long
from The Awl
RON PADGETT
* * *
Survivor Guilt
It’s very easy to get.
Just keep living and you’ll find yourself
getting more and more of it.
You can keep it or pass it on,
but it’s a good idea to keep a small portion
for those nights when you’re feeling so good
you forget you’re human. Then drudge it up
and float down from the ceiling
that is covered with stars that glow in the dark
for the sole purpose of being beautiful for you,
and as you sink their beauty dims and goes out—
I mean it flies out the nearest door or window,
its whoosh raising the hair on your forearms.
If only your arms were green, you could have two small lawns!
But your arms are just there and you are kaput.
It’s all your fault, anyway, and it always has been—
the kind word you thought of saying but didn’t,
the appalling decline of human decency, global warming,
thermonuclear nightmares, your own small cowardice,
your stupid idea that you would live forever—
all tua culpa. John Philip Sousa
invented the sousaphone, which is also your fault.
Its notes resound like monstrous ricochets.
But when you wake up, your body
seems to fit fairly well, like a tailored suit,
and you don’t look too bad in the mirror.
Hi there, feller!
Old feller, young feller, who cares?
Whoever it was who felt guilty last night,
to hell with him. That was then.
from Poem-a-Day
ALAN MICHAEL PARKER
* * *
Candying Mint
Strip thirty good-sized leaves.
Wash them, and pat dry.
Paint the leaves with egg white
and dredge in fine sugar.
Let stand upon a wire rack.
Buber writes, “man’s final objective is this:
to become, himself, a law—a Torah.”
The granules glimmer upon the mint,
hard dew, a glittery,
sweet finish to a fine night
and a flourless chocolate cake
with a little raspberry sauce.
I know that it’s my job, but Rabbi, I worry
because I like worrying,
and I admire the persistence of the mint,
really just a weed: spicy, ragged, alive.
To grow toward the sun—it’s like listening—
and who doesn’t need to aspire?
Yes, Rabbi, the lesson’s true:
to become a law means to know God,
but who could be ready for that?
Rabbi, try the candied mint: it’s heaven.
from The Carolina Quarterly
CATHERINE PIERCE
* * *
Relevant Details
The bar was called The Den of Iniquity,
or maybe The Cadillac Lounge—whatever
it was, its sign was a neon martini glass,
or a leg ending in stiletto. Maybe a parrot. Anyway,
in that place I danced without anyone
touching me but seven men watched
from the bar with embered, truculent eyes.
Or I danced with my boyfriend’s hands
hot around my ribs. Or I didn’t have a boyfriend
and no one was looking and my dance moves
were nervous, sick-eel-ish, and eventually
I just sat down. What I remember for sure
is that was the night I drank well gin
and spun myself into a terrible headache.
That was the night I thought I was pregnant
and drank only club soda. That was
the night I made a tower from Rolling Rock
bottles sometime after midnight
and management spoke to me quietly
but only after snapping a Polaroid
for the bathroom Wall of Fame. In any case,
when I finally stumbled or strode
or snuck outside, the air was Austin-thick,
Reno-dry, Montpellier-sharp. I don’t remember
if my breath clouded or vanished
or dropped beneath the humidity. I don’t remember
if the music pulsing from inside
was the Velvet Underground or Otis Redding
or the local band of mustached banjo men
.
You know this poem has a gimmick,
and you’re right. But understand: if I wrote
Cadillac Lounge, boyfriend, beer tower, soul
it would be suddenly true, a memory lit
by lightning flash. Who needs that sort
of confinement? If the way forward
is an unbending line, let the way back
be quicksilver, beading and re-swirling. Forgive
the trick and let me keep this mix-and-match,
this willful confusion of bars, of beaches,
of iced overpasses and hands on my hands,
all the films with gunfights, all the films
with dogs, the Kandinsky, the Rembrandt,
the moment the moon’s face snapped
into focus, the moment I learned
the word truculent, each moment the next
and the one before, and in this blur,
oh, how many lifetimes I can have.
from Pleiades
DONALD PLATT
* * *
The Main Event
At the weigh-in
on the morning of March 24th, 1962, the World Welterweight Champ,
Benny “Kid” Paret,
called his challenger, Emile Griffith, a maricón—
Cuban slang for “faggot”—
and smiled. Emile wanted to knock the Kid out right there.
Gil Clancy, his manager,
managed to hold him back, told him to “save it for tonight.”
The New York Times
wouldn’t print the correct translation, maintained that Paret had called
Emile an “unman.”
The sportswriter Howard Tuckner raved against the euphemistic
copy editors, “A butterfly
is an unman. A rock is an unman. These lunatics!”
No one would mention
the word “homosexual” in connection with a star
athlete. Another
journalist, Jimmy Breslin—Irish straight-talker—said,
“That was what Paret
was looking to do—get him steamed! If you’re going to look for trouble,
you found it!”
By the twelfth round, both men had tired. They clinched, heads ear
to ear, embracing,
then punching underneath, whaling away at the other’s
ribs, face. Such
intimate hostility. As if, could they have spoken to each other
through plastic mouth guards,
they would have groaned out curses, endearments, pillow talk.
At the close of the sixth round
the Kid had landed a combination, ending in a hard right
to Emile’s chin.
He had gone down in his corner for an eight count,
but got back up
and started slugging as the bell rang and delivered him
from an almost certain
knockout. The crowd had shouted, whistled, roared.
In the black-and-white footage
of the TV broadcast on YouTube, the referee Ruby Goldstein breaks up
their clinch. Photographers
lean in and slide their old-fashioned flash-bulb cameras across the ring’s
sweat-spattered
canvas floor to get a closer shot of the exhausted fighters. Cigarette
and cigar smoke
hangs heavy. The announcer Don Dunphy complains, “This is probably
the tamest round
of the entire fight.” One second later Emile staggers the Kid
with an overhand right.
“Griffith rocks him.” Emile lands twenty-nine punches in eighteen
seconds. “Paret against
the ropes, almost hopeless.” Emile steps back, winds up, then swings
to get his full
body weight into each punch. Eyewitness Norman Mailer, ten feet
away from the fighters,
would write that Emile’s right hand was “whipping like a piston rod
which had broken through
the crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin.”
The crowd screams,
frenzied as piranhas stripping in less than half a minute the flesh
from a cow fallen
into the river. As Emile hammers the Kid’s head with nine straight uppercuts
in two seconds, so it whips
back and forth in the slow-motion replay like a ragdoll’s head shaken
by a girl throwing
a tantrum, one commentator observes, “That’s beautiful
camera work,
isn’t it?” Another responds, “Yeah, terrific.” While Emile mauls
the Kid with mechanical
precision, he may be thinking of how the Kid reached out
and tauntingly patted
his left buttock, lisping Maricón, maricón, as Emile stood
stripped down
to his black trunks on the scales at the weigh-in. Or he may be thinking
of his job designing ladies’
hats in the Garment District. Attach that ostrich feather to the brim
of the blue boater, left hook,
pile-driver right. Lean into the punch. Put him away. But Paret,
tangled in the ropes,
won’t go down. Clancy had told him to keep punching until
the referee separated
them. Emile doesn’t know that the Kid will never regain
consciousness, will die
in ten days. He doesn’t know that for the rest of his life
he will have nightmares
in which he and Paret are marionettes. Someone jerks his strings. He can’t
stop punching. He will become
world champ four more times, but will himself be beaten almost
to death by five young
homophobes, one with a baseball bat, as he leaves a gay bar near Port
Authority. He will drive
a pink Lincoln Continental. After Paret’s death, Manny
Alfaro, the Kid’s manager,
will say, “Now, I have to go find a new boy.” His widow,
Lucy, will bury him
in the St. Raymond Cemetery in the Bronx. She will never
remarry, will tell an interviewer,
“Dream? I stopped dreaming a long time ago.” Boxing matches
will stop being televised
for the next decade. Ruby Goldstein will referee only one more fight,
then retire. Emile
will suffer dementia pugilistica. He will be forced to sell his Continental
and will ride the bus,
he’ll say, “like everyone else.” Benny Paret, Jr., the Kid’s son
who was two years old
when Emile killed his dad, will meet and forgive him forty-two years
later. Lucy
had refused to go to the Garden or watch the fight on TV.
A neighbor had to tell her.
Across nine million flickering screens nation-wide
they hoisted the Kid’s
still body onto a stretcher and carried him slowly out of the ring.
Don Dunphy signed off,
“saying goodnight for your hosts, the Gillette Safety
Razor Co., makers
of the $1.95 Adjustable Razor, super blue blades, foamy shaving
cream, and Right Guard
Power Spray Deodorant, and El Producto, America’s largest-selling
quality cigar.”
from Southwest Review
CLAUDIA RANKINE
* * *
from Citizen
Photograph courtesy of Michael David Murphy
Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs. Like thunder they drown you in sound, no, like lightning they strike you across the larynx. Cough. After it happened I was at a loss for words. Haven’t you said this yourself? Haven’t you said this to a close f
riend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would call you by the name of her black housekeeper? You assumed you two were the only black people in her life. Eventually she stopped doing this, though she never acknowledged her slippage. And you never called her on it (why not?) and yet, you don’t forget. If this were a domestic tragedy, and it might well be, this would be your fatal flaw—your memory, vessel of your feelings. Do you feel hurt because it’s the “all black people look the same” moment, or because you are being confused with another after being so close to this other?
An unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center. The wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse, a dampness drawing your stomach in toward your rib cage. When you look around only you remain. Your own disgust at what you smell, what you feel, doesn’t bring you to your feet, not right away, because gathering energy has become its own task, needing its own argument. You are reminded of a conversation you had recently, comparing the merits of sentences constructed implicitly with “yes, and” rather than “yes, but.” You and your friend decided that “yes, and” attested to a life with no turnoff, no alternative routes: you pull yourself to standing, soon enough the blouse is rinsed, it’s another week, the blouse is beneath your sweater, against your skin, and you smell good.
The rain this morning pours from the gutters and everywhere else it is lost in the trees. You need your glasses to single out what you know is there because doubt is inexorable; you put on your glasses. The trees, their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet. Yes, and it’s raining. Each moment is like this—before it can be known, categorized as similar to another thing and dismissed, it has to be experienced, it has to be seen. What did he just say? Did she really just say that? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? The moment stinks. Still you want to stop looking at the trees. You want to walk out and stand among them. And as light as the rain seems, it still rains down on you.
from Granta
RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN
