DUNCAN AND BRADY

by Julian O. Long

after the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict

 

Speaking of ’lectric cars,

once at a Fort Worth stop sign

a lowrider lifted a fender

like a dog might lift his leg to piss

and flipped me the bird as he took off

laughing around the corner.

That was long ago, but he knew what

he meant—and he loved it.

 

As the uptight white boy I was

in those days, I may have deserved

his contempt. These days I’d like

to blow him a kiss on the wind he stirred,

as he spun out that souped-up Chevy.

Would it were so, amigo,

would it were so.

 

Staggerlee remembers Xmas

but King Brady, he lies dead

and the ghost of old St. Louie

flew past my naked bed

when the rage for George Floyd started

up and down my street,

and the high-tailed carriages

came and went all night

breaking in the windows

knocking down the door

startling me in bed on the second floor... 

 

Busy now, containing Russia,

smug in my alabaster pink

pragmatism, I rejoiced in my country’s

apparent arrested decline. Cop who murdered

Floyd will go to jail, I thought. We threw out

the bastards who stormed the Capitol, I said—

forgetting only too eagerly

Republicans’ settled intention

to lynch the rest of us, La Migra still

lording it up at the border, catching runaways

jury finding Rittenhouse ‘not guilty on all counts.’

 

Nothin’ for it but the blues?

James Baldwin’s Staggerlee let pent up anger, blues remade,

hiss out of him like rancid air from some hack’s

rubber tire.

 

Seem like King Brady never died,

Duncan shot him,

doctor found him dead

but he just raised his hammy fist, took that doctor by the throat

and growled, “Sumbitch, you know I cain’t be killed!”

 

We’ll not overcome this last lynch mob—they’re us;

we’ll watch polite and passive as the Good Old US steals

away down Dixie one last time; no matter clawhammer steels

 

ring out from edges of fields

to tell it again

how we’ve all of us been—

 

yeah, we’ve been on the job

too long... 

Julian O. Long is a previous contributor to The New Verse News. His poems and essays have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Pembroke Magazine, New Texas, New Mexico Magazine, and Horizon among others. His chapbook High Wire Man is number twenty-two in the Trilobite Poetry series published by the University of North Texas Libraries. A collection of his poems, Reading Evening Prayer in an Empty Church, appeared from Backroom Window Press in 2018. Other online publications have appeared or are forthcoming at The Piker Press, Better Than Starbucks, The Raw Art Review, and Litbreak Magazine.  Long has taught school at the University of North Texas, North Carolina State University, and Saint Louis University. He is now retired and lives in Saint Louis, Missouri.

REQUIEM

by Ed Bennett

FALFURRIAS, Texas (Reuters)  May 15, 2013 - Mounds of dirt decorated with fake flowers sit at the northern edge of the cemetery in this town about 80 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Small metal placards mark the graves of the unknown, generally by gender, while others simply say "bones" or "skull case." Photo credit: REUTERS/Eric Thayer.

Quietly,
in the twilight breeze
of an unforgiving desert
we few are arranged
in a mourning group,
a broken minion
for the passing
of the nameless ones:
a young mother
or older sister,
a boy about eight

found between the cholla
and voiceless stones
that hid them from the road
where La Migra rules
and the crosshairs of
the militant ones
guards a sanctified border
in the darkness.

We left water
every mile or so
on the hidden route
where they sojourned,
the brown skinned tribes
of new Israelites
short one Moses and
a caring God’s sight

where the guardians
cut the water jugs
and these two died,
tongues swollen,
a mile south
of the springs.

Coyotes lament
to the waning moon,
a song for souls lost
in the eternity
of the killing night,
the calculus of death
for a too young woman,
a boy yet to live.

Adios,
nameless friends,
may your days be cool
beside Eden’s brook,
the fruit of God’s heavens
be your eternal bounty.

And may our days be riven
by our lost contrition,
may the appeals of patriots
weaken in the echo
of this desert marked
in the blood of innocents.


Ed Bennett is a poet and reviewer living in Las Vegas, NV. His works have appeared in The Externalist, Touch: The Journal of Healing, The Lavender Review, Quill and Parchment and Lilipo. He is a staff editor for Quill and Parchment Magazine, the recipient of a Pushcart Nomination and the author of “A Transit of Venus”.