HOW MUCH CAN WE TAKE?

by Lynne Kemen

after viewing “Continuous Form” by Nishimura Yuko (Japan) 2020—washi paper

The paper is impossibly twisted, pleated

like skirts used to be. How is it possible

that this is paper? Nishimura Yuko's washi

folding into itself, holding a shape

it shouldn't hold.

 

On the wall behind, faces

also impossibly shaped, bearing witness,

watching.

 

Tensile strength. The word makes me think

of tension, how it translates to my own body

squirming to get comfortable, no longer able

to hold erect posture. Two total knee replacements.

Back pain. Neck pain. I'm so tired.

 

Pretti is our conscience. One of the helpers

who always shows up, who cares about others,

who refuses to look away. His phone

documenting what shouldn't be happening,

what we need to see.

 

I used to protest the Vietnam war. Kent State

terrified me—that girl kneeling, her mouth open,

screaming over the body. Some photographs

are that raw, that perfectly horrific.

Once I see them, they're in my DNA somehow,

in my body.

 

I can't stand for long periods now.

And I know I cannot look away.

So many do. They don't think it affects them—

until it does.

 

The sculpture before us, still whole.

Those circular faces, still watching.

We know fabric tears.

We just don't know when.

Lynne Kemen is the author of Shoes for Lucy (SCE Press, 2023) and More Than a Handful (Woodland Arts Editions, 2020). Her work has appeared in One Art, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen's Quinterly, and elsewhere. She received a 2024 Pushcart Prize nomination and serves as Editor/Interviewer for The Blue Mountain Review. She is currently working on two full-length poetry volumes. Lynne lives in rural Delaware County, New York.

BUILDING MATERIALS

by John Kaufmann

The enemies of American democracy? Big lie, big anger and big money. Saving American democracy will require stopping these three powerful forces already on the way to destroying it. —Robert Reich, The Guardian, December 19, 2021

A pallet of salt,

a bucket of chlorine, cement blocks,

two-by-six, one-by-two, shims, PVC, Pex.

I measure you by dollar figures, volume,

weight, time (although that’s the same

as money). Weigh

 

me, you say. Feel me.

 

Skirting panels, J-channels, trusses,

purlins, OSB.  A rust-bucket

excavator and a skid steer.  That was big.

 

I buy you because the lid

tends to blow off. Pipes burst, roofs collapse, septics clog.

Things fall apart. That’s 9,999,999 years

of kidney stones and payment plans,

and another 666,666 of holes you can’t stop digging.

And it gets worse;

it’s the fine print that will kill you,

but it’s the finer print that will grind you down. 

 

Pipe cutter, jig saw, ozone machine, tamper—

I buy you to shape the world, 

but the world shapes me.

Still, I use you to bang against it.

 

A caudillo with hair the color of a lion, a gaze

blank and pitiless as I-don’t-know-what and stubby hands

is moving his greasy thighs among the indignant desert birds—

but it’s not in Egypt this time. It’s here,

in the cracked septic tanks, the water mains made of electrical conduit and duct tape,

the shoddy foundations, the rotting window frames and leaky roofs.

It’s in the kung flu, the water boiling

slowly as the frogs hump, the Vulpine

chants to lock her up—or him—someone, please—

We have traced the call, ma’am, and it’s coming from inside the house.

 

Nuts, bolts, washers, screws (“I love you”, they say),

Wingnuts, eye bolts, U-bolts, hanger bolts, sex bolts.

Common nails, box nails, roofing nails, brads. I love you, too.

Not because you’ll bind us together. We are fated to spin out

like a bunch of Balkan states, a rogue galaxy or a pyrotechnic display.

I love you for the way you ding! when I drive you home, the way

you marry your two halves when I tighten you, how

you cleave a roof panel to a truss and how you bite into cement.

I love you because you don’t budge—because you

stay put while we are thrown against the fan, emerge

and float off into blue heaven, scattered.

John Kaufmann is a former lawyer, current mobile home park owner who lives in southern New York State.  His writing has been published in The High Plains Register, Off Assignment, Litro, The Journal of the Taxation of Financial Products, The Journal of Taxation of Investments, and Tax Notes.