3 poems
What Aureate in the Dimming
If March in New Orleans, if April or May
at home in Georgia is not gorgeous enough,
your porch view merely pretty,
lightning bugs among the dusky rosemary,
oaks and birches, the elders beyond
the limestone wall behind the pond
branching into clouds;
if back with friends in June in Providence,
a trip in July to Provincetown,
men tight and shirtless up and down Commercial,
on the beach, book in hand, wavebeat
foaming over you, brine in your nose,
if sun rippling waterskin is not enough;
if you’ve been schooled out
of loving to read, of reading for
the feeling of words doing as they want and must;
if the Mets, opera and museum,
are in New York and you are not—
Picasso’s Stein, Rothko’s smoky tremolos
Karita Mattila’s blazing Manon:
The heavens
darken down around me—
the consolations of art compromised
by your lack of common joys:
a chair in the open, leaflight
fingering your cocktail
glass pizzicato over wet ink over spilled pages;
If the politics of your personal life
are too trying to try; if the Internet
doesn’t answer your call
and the apps don’t tap back;
if you feel too tied up to feel
tied to this world
— Orlando — Baltimore — Ferguson —
lured and bound by the hum
by online tv news clips of
— hurricane — fire — flood —
your waking hours a whorl of hi-def dyed industrial haze
feathered with the fluttering lashes of a vision
that flirts with the ever-aloof conditional,
teased by the veiling smiles of the
hypothetical, the theoretical proof, the long arm of the subjunctive—
could it if only it would it were so—
winking I want you from the other side, or is it
I own you, a come hither or a fuck you
look—looking hard as you can, you can’t tell,
hard-pressed as you are for it (but which)
as it dresses you down—or is it
just too late and twinkling out
leaving you alone hooked to your screen, cli-click-clicker
taut in your hand, tied tired to the done been seen—
So? What? Now?
Decamped (Castrato Song)
In San Francisco
in Berkeley and Oakland
small hills
blanket the sidewalks
for warmth.
Warned to watch
your step
to step in fear of
stepping in
what you can’t safely say is
canine or human.
Tiffany’s and tents. Neiman Marcus and needles. Macy’s and mental illness. The number one tourist complaint. Businessmen know: It’s the very brand of San Francisco that’s at risk…we should be concerned about that. And we are. (SF Chronicle)
A man walks along Castro
fabulously naked
but for a reflective gold
cock sock
while another perches
nicely shirtless outside Walgreens
his waist wrapped
in rainbow in hopes of
attracting a handsome
price: Too Ugly
to Prostitute
too Honest to Steal
his cardboard claims.
CA Propositions Q and J and K. Exchange tents for beds: Yes. Money for shelters: Yes. 1,200 beds for 6,700 bodies in 2016. Taxes for money for sheltering bodies: No and No and No. (The New York Times)
At Diamond—or was it
Eureka—the landed man shouts
out a second story
window at parked cars
as we pass,
shaming don’t
a young straight couple
on the street
she baring want
her ass to piss to go
between the cars
glistening
in a last flourish of day
darkening
his glittery gayborhood I see
I want
to see don’t want
that
he shouts go
elsewhere!
Manila, Jakarta, Mexico City. L.A., Portland, Berkeley. 7,500 in San Francisco (10,000…12,000…). Always moving. Moved. Like nonentities, like their belongings the police promise to store—they'll just dump them. (SF Gate)
Keep the Castro Queer
cries the sign
from the window below,
a line-up of Billy dolls
peering out
all abs and assless chaps hard plastic dicks hung disco balls
and placards calling
Resist!
The look from the window
of disbelief
elsewhere
The sound from the street
of disbelief
She’s gotta piss
somewhere! Not here
tossed back, not the streets
he daily walks
his Min Pin down.
Take it down the block.
I scan up.
Down, girl!
Not the block on which
he regularly leaves her
shit in the direct path
of the lowering sun.
Homeless women guaranteed assault. Guys for safety but they usually beat them. So hard, 50s look 70. 65-year-old Zulema, Argentine. Marcia, 56, a black woman with a cane. Dorothy sleeps on the bus when no beds are open, lines receding to the break of day. (The Nation)
The look on her face
as she steadies herself
on car bumpers
as one man blocks her
from view
from the sidewalk
and another screams
from the flushed sky
as we tramp along
hand husbanding hand taken in pants tight t-shirt tails
nipped and tucked.
Raging (Eco-Economics in the Age of Neo-Fascism)
San Francisco, October 2017
On a day of leisure and lingering, on a walk
When an incensed scent of wood
Overtook the medicinal stench
Of weed on Valencia. Breathe
It in. Akin to kindling.
A kind of hearthlit breeze, until at home the
News Flew Open
Windscream sideways rainfire of embers
Spark Flash Flood the treetops
Engulfed
Yesterday
Tomorrow
Whole towns
— Shut down —
— Ground up —
— Bombed out —
Fog over
San Francisco
Not fog. — buzzz —
Wine and singing just a week ago
In Sonoma, we fags and drag queens
Dancing warmly lit riverside
Beach party by fire pit.
Enjoying tastes along the way,
Jeff Cohn and Enkidu and Walt (swallow,
Don’t spit) Wines and Equality
Vines, to name a few.
Lips chastened as a mother
Tongue. The two of us
Drinking poolside a Monday noon
With the rest of the guests
Long poured out. A final mojito
A fête accompli and then
Back home the news spewed
Like fog over a warm day.
If only Chardonnay could shimmer
Back to water. At any rate. — wail —
The Leader on high on want for what
The Leader will no doubt please himself
To chastise us with: our fiscal
Losses. Just like he did
With Puerto Rico. Bad
Deal or just
Desserts? the Leader
Asks the Leader
Rallies. So many
Tongues roll eyes roil
Like surge waters, fire walls
Darken the sky. — squall —
Not wholly unlike Puerto Rico. Unlike Puerto Rico,
Maybe he’ll care—Cali gilded light-bright and far afield
Of the lack-lustered colonies — iiiiiiiiiiinnnnngh —
Blacked-out and drowning—check your feed-
Back—just like New Orleans after Katrina. After Maria,
¿Cómo estás? Mad
— Diablo —
— Winds —
— Raging —
Flames storming houses like a crazed Russian River
Gunning down Agua Caliente Road flooding the valleys
The hills the trees even their sports car couldn’t outrun it,
Ignited. May the Leader’s Bounty
Rain its balm upon us to sate us, to soak up
Our spite and spitting tears, we who are
Incited. — squeeeeeeel —
US refugees running to the foreign shores
Of Florida—imagine Florida without power
For months—all those silver
Voters filling up
The freezer, America
Up in arms and armored in
Artillery. It’s in the blood,
They claim: arterial. If only
Fish from fire could form
To swim across, if only
Currents could be cast over
The Big Water
To light to feed the otherworldly
Incitizens of whose Republic. At any rate.
By any ruse a snake oiler,
Pounding chests pounding
Coffers over coffins, blackened and
Warped, ever claims
Fire cleanses,
Water purifies,
Surely burns.
Michael Tod Edgerton is the author of the poetry collection Vitreous Hide from Lavender Ink press. His poems have appeared previously as the winner of the Boston Review and Five Fingers Review contests, and in Coconut, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, EOAGH, New American Writing, New Orleans Review, Posit, and Sonora Review, among other journals. The poems in this issue of Interim are from his recently completed full-length poetry manuscript, “Yet Sensate Light.” He holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University, a PhD in English from the University of Georgia, and currently lives with his husband in San Francisco. Check out Tod’s ongoing participatory project at WhatMostVividly.com.