{surreality & switch}

I'm back in NYC for the moment, and at the moment, back in the Teachers & Writers office. highly surreal. the louderARTS slam team is rehearsing and I am here because the VIA workshop ran too long for me to make Oscar's award thing or the after-reading. sigh.

OK, so here's the poem I've been working on of late. As always, comments welcome!

switch

1: Julius

forgive me mother for I have sinned as if the switch
were my own hand, my teeth electric like stars
or barbed wires running temple to temple / she is dead
and I said nothing / until the first switch clicked
we believed a stay was coming. how could it be:
death for note-taking, the state's lie that we knew anything
about atoms? maybe plenty we're “guilty” of but not
that / and her? nothing. a trick, lure, all we could do
was turn it back on them / oh, it was the lock-
lipped promise (no names, no names) that killed her
and me next, the boys pulled away by car mouthing
one more day until I thought my jaw would break

2: (a friend)

otherwise,
they could never have looked at each other
again.
anything else would have required that they be
two entirely different people.
naming
wasn't an option. though I thought if they gave just one,
even a false one,
it might have saved them, not left those boys
orphaned.
but they were as likely to do that as to turn into polar bears
and run.

3: Ethel

could you kiss your children with a rotten mouth? send whom
to the chair in my place? no mother dies gladly but the boys,
they know that we love them. it's enough

4: son #1: Michael

we were raised to question everything but their innocence.
at night I'd lie in the backyard that took us in
and count the stars that hung like teeth / nobody said
how they died so I thought of her hanging, him maybe
standing before a firing squad. in the movies,
nobody brave dies like that.

5: Ethel, again

this is my grave talking. my tombstone, all mouth now
as I couldn't be then / I believe revolution comes in minutes
and inches / I was too small for the chair, they had
to kill me twice / what does that tell you

6: Ivy Meropol

I grew up watching the Picasso of my grandmother
say nothing. I do not confirm or deny
that the photographs told me not to ask
my father too many questions.

until this year, when I split the camera's eye open
like a half-healed scab, he'd never spoken to the man
who sold my grandparents for a cell key and his own neck

I am making a documentary of this

7: son #2: Robert

flashbulbs.
Edsels.
barbed wire,
crayons.
red flowered aprons.
raspberry jello.
telephones.
elevators with round white push-buttons.
electric stoves.
rubber-soled shoes, linoleum, hallways.
pillboxes.
collar stays.
the static between radio stations.
anything getting smaller with distance.

8

we really thought we'd make it. when the rabbi came,
I was sure I'd see her again

9

Julius seemed in better shape so I took Ethel first. her hand
so small in mine

10

going into it, she knows. knows
going into it, knowing the go
will not be. easy, she goes. the going
an into parallax gone. she. easy. will be
gone, an easy parallax, being. gone already
into ease. an into not gone but parallax, turn,
going, will into knowing. known. she turning
parallax already easing into gone, please, turn,
being not. into the already being being
turn. in a small way, it was as if she knew
the electrodes would slip and death jump twice.
gone the easy parallax, the already not being.
she knew, and in the knowing, nothing
already was.

11

I am making a documentary of this.

12

when it all started, Stalin was Uncle Joe, stopping
the Nazis. now we're prey again. remember us
in soft-soled shoes and the kitchen, trying. yes,
like that. quiet now.