SCHADENFREUDE

by Kate Bernadette Benedict

Think of it as the finest of desserts,

a cake of red velvet or German chocolate,

the delectable finale to a wretched meal, 

one bitter course after another,

vinegar in our flutes instead of wine.

How the sweetness makes everything right!

How it neutralizes that slosh of acids

a supper of suffering inflicted.

Relish it slowly, bite by exquisite bite.

Lick the icing from your fingers.

It's a miracle of a confection, it's never done,

the cakes just keep coming.

There's more for everyone.

Kate Bernadette Benedict of New York City is the author of Earthly Use: New and Selected Poems.

THE SKYSCRAPER MUSEUM

by Kate Bernadette Benedict

Even after the crisis eases, companies may let workers stay home. That would affect an entire ecosystem, from transit to restaurants to shops. —The New York Times, May 12, 2020

Indeed. This lobby is marble-graced.
Heels would echo as workers raced
for pinging elevators, though some stopped
at newsstands first, where they’d opt
for breath mints and a morning paper.
Here’s a New York Times, with vintage
headline. Centennial of Brooklyn Bridge.

Let’s go up, let’s press floor 43.
Bad art, glass walls, a ficus tree.
Outside : virtual sky and steeple.
Inside: holograms of busy people
dressed like Peggy and Joan and Draper.
Here’s a typewriter. Hear it clacking?
Pages on the side for stacking.

What a time it was! It ended.
Congregating got suspended.
The energy of streaming streets.
Uptown, Mad Men; downtown, Beats.
Coffee smells and carbon paper.
Towers went up and towers fell,
a simple virus fouled the well.

So let us praise Manhattan
as it used to be
and marvel that we worked that way
in harmony
in soaring buildings
that caught the sun
and let in moonlight too.
Eras end. History gives them due.

Kate Bernadette Benedict, of New York City, is the author of Earthly Use: New and Selected Poems.

LISTEN TO THE COLD: A ONCE-YOUNG EDITOR REMEMBERS

by Kate Bernadette Benedict

 “I’ve just visited Rod McKuen!”
 “Who’s he?” asked the other passenger
and the elevator took us down.

Author's note: As a young book editor, Rod McKuen was assigned to me and I helped bring out two of his books (The Power Bright and Shining and The Beautiful Strangers).  In a way, the situation pained me, for my preference, even then, was for poetry of a more literary type ... but still, this was Rod of the Lovable Persona, so I was torn between warring impulses of wanting to dismiss him and wanting him to read aloud in that husky voice, just to me.

Kate Bernadette Benedict lives and writes in Riverdale, NY.

THE EXPERT MANICURE

given by Marilyn Monroe to Sylvia Plath in a dream

by Kate Bernadette Benedict

[In his new biography of Sylvia Plath, American Isis, Carl] Rollyson points to an often ignored journal entry from October 1959 in which Plath recounts being visited by Marilyn Monroe in a dream. Monroe, Plath writes, was dressed like a "fairy godmother" and appeared in a setting that she imagined to be similar to an upcoming dinner party with T.S. Eliot to which she and Hughes had been invited. Plath writes: "I spoke, almost in tears, of how much she and Arthur Miller meant to us, although they could, of course, not know us at all. She gave me an expert manicure. . . . She invited me to visit during the Christmas holidays, promising a new, flowering life." --Micah Mattix, The Wall Street Journal 
Image source: The Cheryl Flavour

Who is this, under stage light, bowing over my gnawed and ink-dark nails?
It is the White Goddess, with the platinum air.

It is the moon woman, in full, in full illumination.
She is in my thrall, it is a wonderment. She is at my beck and call.

See how she eradicates the blue discolorations!
She achieves an alchemy; the cuticles dissolve.

The bright chromium of her tools, the shimmering lotions!
How is it such holiness misspends itself on me¾

Me with my Maenad’s fury and my matronly hair?
It is like being stung by a seraph or poured into the cup of a tulip.

The jars are arrayed before us, the glamorous polishes.
Tangerines, mauves, and those appalling plasma reds.

These lights are the lights of Migraine, I cannot choose now.
But the hour is late, and the audience is waiting.

See them staring at us, in the Stygian shadows?
A vast arrangement of bald heads, utterly still.

What do they want from us, blonde godmother?
What must we do, do, do to make them satisfied?

I do not think they require a death.
That is another matter entirely.

What is the name of that pale lacquer with the mirrory sheen?
I would name it Isis, I would name it Icicle.

How you perfect me now, with your finishing touches!
White nails, the immaculate hands of a virgin, my hands.

They will dance poems onto pages, danses macabres, arabesques.
I will join you one day in the Pantheon, I am statuesque.


Kate Bernadette Benedict is a poet living in Riverdale, NY. She was the editor/publisher of the online poetry journals Umbrella and Tilt-a-Whirl.