by David Lehman
& wanted that to be forever—
boy after boy after boy after boy
pulling me down into the dirt.
from Prairie Schooner
MAGGIE SMITH
* * *
Good Bones
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
from Waxwing
R. T. SMITH
* * *
Maricón
i.m. Emile Griffith (1938–2013), Benny “Kid” Peret (1937–1962)
And a man who has found prowess in boxing, grant him favor and joy. . . .
—Pindar
1.
“Whoever controls the breathing in the ring
controls the fight,” my father says. Smell of sweat,
Vaseline and bleach, sting of ammonia. “The art
of self-defense is crucial.” The gym is damp
and the speed bag singing his beliefs. Elsewhere,
a husky boy from the Virgin Islands quietly
designs hats in a Bronx shop, his chest bare
as he hefts storeroom cartons. His boss says,
“Boy’s got a boxer’s body,” and that begins it.
Emile is bewildered, with no desire for the sweet
science of footwork and fist, no assassin’s
eye. When a backyard bully named Jeffrey
lures me to his ring of jeering rednecks,
I clear a path with my ball bat, rush home
to mother, because I’m skinny, afraid. Later,
seeing me teary on the mat at a Scout outing
and pawing feebly at Jimmy Kizner, my father
resolves to plunge me into the discipline.
“To win, you control the breathing,” he insists.
Morning roadwork, shadowboxing, mitts.
On his bike, the old man swears as I sweat,
“Your target’s never where his goddamn head
is, but where it’s going next.” Willowy, skittish,
without finesse, I never overcome my fear.
Griffith is a better fit—welterweight, bobcat
quick, graceful as ballet. Coach Gil Clancy
taunts him: “Don’t you get that matador strut.”
Deft and canny through the fifties, his gold tooth
gleaming and bombshell blondes clenching
his biceps at ringside, the shutterbug’s flash
catching the velvet dandy in action,
pearls on his cuffs, satin cravat. Dark mouse
on my brow, I bus back across town
from the gym to mother’s tears,
tonic and gin, a dead cigarette. “My other
half ought to know better,” she spits.
He travels, sleuthing out insurance fraud,
arson while slick-dealing firehouse
poker. She twists her opal ring, exhales
blue breath. I don’t want to be prissy,
hope to show I’ve got moxie, like a pro,
like that March night when ring pundits
all agree: Peret opened inspired.
2.
Whoever controls the breathing. . . .
Jab and tuck, shoot the right high, hook
to the ribs, drive him to the turnbuckle,
the ropes, the canvas. Griffith has to be
schooled in fury: “It’s red sport, boy,”
and rumor has it the insiders suspect
he’s keeping a secret, the private life
of linen suits, the pink Lincoln crucial
to his macho disguise. Still, no one
will say “pansy.” Control the breathing,
control a rival’s will and snuff his soul.
“Wind and feet win it. You have to show
an iron intent”: in the garage my father
pops me. “Love taps,” he says. “You’ve
got to learn to shrug it off. Forget thinking.
Make me miss, slugger. Everybody
has a plan, but it’s gone to smoke soon
as you get hit. Duck now. Control your
breath, counterpunch, get mad. Murder
me, creampuff. Make me suffer.” Years
later, his career over, Emile jokes,
“I like girls and men pretty much equal.
You reckon that make me bilingual?”
He’d known Peret since boyhood, but never
heard those venomed syllables: maricón.
I hammered into the heavy bag mummied
in duct tape, pounded that son of a bitch.
“Punish the sap. Maul him up. Make
him miss.” Still, my father’s snarl. . . .
I skip the rope as it hums, side step,
hop and cross-over, wrists whipping,
weaving, sparring my shadow—left, left
right uppercut. At the weigh-in Peret
keeps whispering what Griffith can’t
bear to catch. He guesses the word’s
out and starts lurching and whirling,
breathless, shamed. Kid has crossed
the line. Maricón, maricón, slur worse
than tu mamá—“You faggot!” Mild Emile
bides his time. It’s sixty-two, my bouts all
history, scuffed gloves and lace-up boots
in a footlocker . . . one local trophy—runner-up.
3.
March 24, Saturday night: Gillette’s parrot
cawks about razors—“Feel sharp, be sharp.”
The male world seethes: Muriel cigars,
Edie Adams’s racy ringside purr: “Why
don’t you pick one up and smoke it
sometime?” Her sexy sigh and vixen eyes.
The Garden’s a riot of hazed bloodlust,
our Philco’s volume high. Mother
flips Life in the kitchen with her
sisters, filter tips, a gray kitten. Ruby
Goldstein scolds: “No head butts, boys,
no low blows or rabbits. Protect
yourself, break clean.” The pair already
glisten, sponged wet for combat,
breathing easy, both believing, mouth
guards pouting their lips, as if to kiss
and make nice. All a question of mettle
and skill. No one present thinks, “Death.”
Bell after bell, circling, sizing up, an even
match for the gaudy belt, the world
sport-smitten, trance-tense, breathless.
A clinic: dole-it-out and roll-with-punches,
clenches, weave, dance, until Emile
finds his moment: no one later can say
how the energy shifts. Rationed breath,
second wind, willpower, a dark gift.
Revived, Emile goes ballistic in the twelfth.
Benny is rubber-kneed, reeling, Emile a man
on fire, windmilling such fury the analysts
go quiet. Some will later say it was only
chance; a few, that a word kept him angry
and whipping in frenzy, making history—
sixteen blows in eight
seconds. Others
count it different, but Benny the Kid was
Cuban: “Them Castro boys would possum,”
is the common wisdom, while Griffith’s
one rumored weakness is “can’t finish.”
4.
Sugar Ray claimed Emile was frantic to lay
the rumor in its grave, sew every smirk
shut. I never skipped or bobbed fast enough,
but could hit quick for a white boy—gut
punch, cross, straight shot to the kisser,
a southpaw. I got whipped over and over.
Why did nobody throw in the towel?
Crowd-crazed, Griffith was a tornado,
a blur, oblivious. “I just kept hitting,”
he’d tell a ringside guru still sporting
his blood-spattered tux. “Kid, he didn’t
gone down. I kept hitting.” Even after,
the specialists said, “a fighter, a soldier,
he’ll recover.” My father hit the OFF
knob, declaring, “That boy won’t fight
again. Neither of them. Animals.” For ten
days, Emile paced and prayed. The hacks
wrote, “Benny is a warrior.” The coma
ended in a wake and blame—referee,
Emile, even the corner crew who never
lofted the rolled towel into the melee
to ask for mercy. Was it two full years
afterwards with no prizefights on TV?
For decades I never heard the story
behind that word. Years later, leaving
a dance bar called Hombre, Griffith was
ambushed by a dozen and barely breathing
when the siren arrived. A bystander said
they taunted him with: “Maricón.
Rise up, boy, show us how it’s done
back there in the nigger islands.”
5.
Emile had a silk voice, shy eyes, a smile
to lure songbirds from their perches.
He danced with every step he took.
Kid’s weeping mother slapped him
in the hospital lobby, spat the word
in his eyes—maricón. In his sleep
he saw Benny perdito, bleeding from
every mirror and never unleashed again
that stormy combination. History
has nearly erased his name like cheroot
smoke and Edie, Gene Fulmer, Dick Tiger,
Hurricane and Archer. It surely lurks for
everyone, a burning word, forbidden, worse
than split eyelids, bruised kidneys. Is it
yearning for mercy that drives us to misery?
In a world of desperate skirmish and work,
the teardrop bag still hangs in my attic,
and I will not whip it. Does that win me
a measure of grace? My old man was
nearly right: to beat fear I have to feed anger,
I pray there’s some better purpose for fury
than knocking another man into the dark.
from Prairie Schooner
A. E. STALLINGS
* * *
Shattered
Another smashed glass,
wrong end of a gauche gesture
towards a cliff—compass-
rose of mis-direc-
tions, scattered to the twelve winds,
the wine-dark sea wreck.
Wholeness won’t stay put.
Why these sweeping conclusions?
Always you’re barefoot,
nude-soled in a room
fanged with recriminations,
leaning on a broom.
How can you know what’s
missing, unless you puzzle
all the shards? What cuts
is what’s overlooked,
the sliver of the unseen,
faceted, edged, hooked,
unremarked atom
of remorse broadcast across
lame linoleum.
Archaeologist
of the just-made mistake, sift
smithereens of schist
for the unhidden
right-in-plain-sight needling
mote in the midden.
Fragments, say your feet,
make the shivered, shimmering
brokenness complete.
from Harvard Review
PAMELA SUTTON
* * *
Afraid to Pray
Dear God I’m afraid if I pray for my daughter’s safety you’ll blithely
allow her to get raped or abducted or crash on a highway
on a perfect summer day. Forget I mentioned my daughter. What daughter?
I remember how Anne Frank believed in the goodness of mankind.
I wonder how she felt the moment her diary was knocked from her hands
because that’s how I’m feeling these days: like Job with post-traumatic
stress disorder. Don’t worry, God, I know you exist; but I’m having some
serious trust issues. Maybe it began with that nightmare about my
mother shoving my grandmother into a swift-running river.
I jumped in to save her, and I saved her all right, but O the branches
and Kentucky mud stuck in our hair and mouths—the disbelief
in her eyes—and me having to tell her the truth.
Dear God if you made us in your likeness because you were
lonely then uh-oh. I’m so tired of Nazis marching to the rhythm of my
prayers.
I prayed that the love of my life would survive his cancer then he died on my
birthday.
And for thirty years I prayed my ex-husband would survive his insanity, but
he
finally blew his brains out. I know there’s a heaven because
I walked along a tightrope of Atlantic foam after Joel died and
a rainbow lassoed the sun. The sky was timorous and thin
as an eardrum and I knew if I pushed with all of my rage
that the sky would burst and we would touch hands one last time.
I’m so tired of praying and getting punched in the gut. I prayed that
my parents would not sell my sister’s black Morgan horse with the star
on its forehead, but they sold it all right and now she’s afraid to love her own
children.
I prayed that my parents would not sell the hand-built log cabin on the
Indian reservation, but when they knew they could die without selling it,
they sold
it all right and the new owners bulldozed it down along with everything in it
including a Bible my mother had placed just so. And they chopped down the
forest
and threw my canoe in a dumpster. Now all I do is scour real estate ads for
log cabins
on the Indian reservation. I’ve found a few places but they’re just not the
same. Still,
I’d like to move back to the northwoods and live in a cabin and pray to the
lake
and the woods and the wolves. Like God the wolves would not answer my
prayers,
but unlike God, by God they would listen for once and look me straight in
the eye.
from Prairie Schooner
CHASE TWICHELL
* * *
Sad Song
It’s ridiculous, at my age,
to have to pull the car onto the shoulder
because Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash
are singing “Girl from the North Country,”
taking turns remembering not one girl,
but each of their girls, one and then the other,
a duet that forces tears from my eyes
so that I have to pull off the road and weep.
Ridiculous! My sadn
ess is fifty years old!
It travels into sorrow and gets lost there.
Not because it calls up first love, though it does,
or first loss of love, though both
are shawls it wears to hide its wound,
a wound to the girl of which
all men sing, the girl split open,
the sluice through which all of childhood pours,
carrying her out of one country
into another, in which she grows up
wearing a necklace of stones,
one for each girl not her,
though they all live together here
in the North Country, where the winds
hit heavy on the borderline.
from Salmagundi
JAMES VALVIS
* * *
Something
The minute the doctor says colon cancer
you hardly hear anything else.
He says other things, something
about something. Tests need to be done,
but with the symptoms and family something,
excess weight, something about smoking,
all of that together means something something
something something, his voice a dumb hum
like the sound of surf you know must be pounding,
but the glass window that has dropped down
between you allows only a muffled hiss
like something something. He writes a prescription
for something, which might be needed, he admits.
He hands you something, says something, says goodbye,
and you say something. In the car your wife says
something something and something about dinner,
about needing to eat, and the doctor wanting tests
doesn’t mean anything, nothing, and something
something something about not borrowing trouble
or something. You pull into a restaurant
where you do not eat but sit watching her
eat something, two plates of something,
blurry in an afternoon sun thick as ketchup,
as you drink a glass of something-cola
and try to recall what the doctor said
about something he said was important,
a grave matter of something or something else.
from The Sun
