GREEN

by John Minczeski

On the news feed this morning,

on my phone’s small screen, two

children shot dead at morning Mass

before school. Others wounded

before the shooter turned the gun

on himself. Pardon me, readers,

this is not a poem, 

I must follow Adorno’s 

dictum. And yet, how refuse 

the poem, however prosaic

and filled with reportage. How,

gentle reader, can I look at the tree

in my front window, the one 

thinking of turning yellow,

that just yesterday made me think

life and beauty fill the same page.

This is not a poem, it is an outrage.

Twenty minutes from here,

maybe twenty five from my toast

and eggs sunny side up, the dead

and wounded children. Like ones

I taught in my career, whose eyes 

brightened with poems. 

A few clouds punctuate the sky. 

My younger brother has arrived

in Wyoming to drive my reclusive

older brother to California.

This is not a poem, it is a window

to my older brother so taken

with the beauty of the Tetons

he tried killing himself. At the end

of King Kong, a guy says it was

beauty that killed the beast. 

Therefore two brothers are in a car

driving west to a new normal,

and children with head wounds

are being treated at Hennepin General.

This is not a poem, this is a treatise

on teaching theodicy to six year olds.

This is me looking out the window

watching wind flip the leaves.

The green, the verde, que te quiero

verde of Lorca. Green leaves,

green children, que te quiero.

 

John Minczeski is the author of five collections as well as several chapbooks. His poems have appeared  previously in NVN as well as The New Yorker, The Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Minczeski worked as a poet in the schools for many years, and has taught at various colleges and universities around the Twin Cities. He served as president of the board for The Loft Literary Center when it was on the second floor of a bookshop in the Dinkytown area of Minneapolis.

TO EAT AND LEAVE THE NIGHT AN EMPTY PLATE

by Alejandro Escudé

A Donald Trump mural painted by street artist Hanksy on Orchard St. between Canal and Division Sts. on the Lower East Side. —NY Daily News Photo by SHAWN INGLIMA

In the blonde hair-skunk, in the barbershop of the mind
where the scissors raise hairs and pat them down
to demand what one wants not needs, the patience of a lion,
ingenuity of a roach, America with a Trump at its head,
the roach motel of the world, on his knees, a nice picture…
what he said to the young woman on t.v.,
a working class woman, it’s a nice picture, you
on your knees. Walled off in the mind, the soul
a mountain range of rage and nowhere to go but
to the streets where a young man bears the likeness
of North America on his bloodied face.
Do we recall the ISIS terrorist in his jeep
happy to drag five corpses? Five corpses
hanging from the moon, five corpses loaded like bullets
into the chamber of a gun, you fire-walker, you brandist,
you woman-basher, you human torture chamber,
you radioactive toad, you lacquered manipulator,
you burnt toast anachronism, you oversexed missile,
you Roman fop, you Towers burning, one man leaps
from a window of the World Trade, martyr man,
L-man, J-woman, moon feces in the shape of Trump,
in the shape of Mar-a-Lago, in the shape of Chris Christie,
piles in the cemetery where Lorca’s body lies forever
falling, never forgetting the artists’ Golgotha
in the rainstorm of human history where Trump’s foot soldiers
come to take Federico away at dawn as the rooster crows
as the apostle drowns his only son as George Washington
steps on the muddy bank as Hamilton takes aim at Burr
as Burr is borne again as the harrowing present grows wings
as the Star-Spangled Banner itself sings as the baseball field
turns to boner flowers or red licorice for wealthy trophy wives
as the hives of the rich enlarge as the states pronounce
themselves more significant than the next. Who comes
in the name of business rats? Who’s driven in Picasso
limousines? Who comes in chariots of designer
water bottles? Who comes in light-clouds Wall Street?
Who comes wagging an Arizona finger? Who comes
riding a marble horse? To eat and leave the night
an empty plate for children to weep, for the landlord
to tie our wrists down in the apex of our city streets
where the thief is arrested, shouting in stressed vowels,
as the helicopter shakes our house out of its safe slumber
and into another broken eight years of politicos and bankers,
eight years of sourceless regrets, eight years of teachers
blamed like communists, eight years of flogging
middlemen, eight years of clown-hog campaigns,
eight years of pornographic magazine covers, eight years
of cigars and neon caviar, eight years of swimming in pools
full of sheep semen. We, it began, we, it finishes, we.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems, My Earthbound Eye, in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.