Poetry
The Elect,
This Time Gone So Fine
The Elect (3 November 2004)*
You can’t hear me
whimper over thumps
on your Bible—the whumpety-
whumps of a flat losing
air—quickly, quickly, we’re going away
where rubber meets sum down the road: fur;
flesh. Blaring
lights light dead eyes. Mouse.
Turtle-deer. Some body’s home-
made child
stitched up,
to look almost real.
*November 2nd, George W. Bush was elected to a second term, as 43rd President of the United States.
Eight months earlier, we'd shocked and awed Iraq.
This Time Gone So Fine
1.
Sheltered wilderness a paradox, naturally
macabre. I am
inside. Outside, goofy
moose-face above graceful gams;
loon’s tremolo; grand
web’s hoarding. Nights,
the cat, her catch. Each fresh kill
makes kitty cry, a sound like sex while mourning.
Her hunts aren’t required.
Prides don’t play with food. Domestication confuses.
What cat bats, bats back.
A mole, a vole, last night,
a squirrel. Restless
and mean, I wrest her prize,
fling it from the porch.
She sniffs blood.
I stalk off.
She’s found in first light.
A man lifts the dead
rodent. Paws
recall my grandmother’s hands
in final days, each pointy nail,
perfection. Left eye, an em dash,
the right, open, shining, a tiny
black olive, or just an eye
witness to its own abrupt subtraction.
2.
Five a.m. walkout.
Be where the storm
is
a wooden porch,
a pewtered pond.
Pink sugar-water attracts
wings razoring razoring
rain
persistent
wings stay winds. Sharp
bones warm
within feathers and flap.
Slim bills suck
sappy treats meant only for them.
What can you say of false nectar?
It would rot birds’ teeth.
Jays come.
So do squirrels—quarrels.
Some want water, others, seeds.
Each wants to feast another’s feeder.
Nature’s raw raucousness flares,
ebbs. Out on the pond
a loon’s eye, red.
Contributor
Elena AlexanderElena Alexander is a poet and writer. Poems or prose appear in, e.g., BOMB, the Brooklyn Rail, Geometry Literary Journal, Hanging Loose, Rattapallax, and as of May, 2019, The Body in Language:An Anthology. Alexander’s poem, “How the Lurking,” was chosen to be made into a public poster (2001). She wrote and edited Footnotes: Six Choreographers Inscribe the Page(Routledge, 1998), and received Honorable Mention, The O. Henry Awards Prize Stories, Best of 1997.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Diana Copperwhite: The Clock Struck Between Time
By Robert R. ShaneJUNE 2019 | ArtSeen
The question one asks while experiencing Diana Copperwhite’s new paintings is: When are they happening? As the exhibition title, The Clock Struck Between Time suggests, the artwork places us in an ambiguous temporal space, drifting from the present moment into a memory still struggling to take form.
TIME:SPANS 2019
By George GrellaOCT 2019 | Music
When Milton Babbitt wrote his article, “Who Cares if You Listen?” he unleashed a virus that has proven itself as robust and contagious as the flu. Published in High Fidelity magazine in 1958, the article quickly turned into a totem representing both every piece of new composing that audiences didn't even want to try to listen to and also how irrelevant those audiences were supposed to be to modern composers—and vice versa.
Shifting and Symmetry of Time
By George WidenerJUL-AUG 2018 | Critics Page
Although my investigations and conceptions of time are certainly self-taught and personal, they are not necessarily outside the canon of human experience or destiny. They’re in fact juxtaposed to the future evolution of technology and human neurological development. This is to say that perhaps one day some of my pictures will awaken from their present hibernation. The question here is whether my calendric calculations and reference points are merely personal or whether they’re connected to a futuristic synergized public.
Stephen Milner: A Spiritual Good Time
By John CappettaSEPT 2019 | ArtSeen
Stephen Milner’s appropriated images culled from surf and gay porn magazines pre-dating 1990 re-code the concept of boys club from frat house basement to queer-inclusive activity meet-up.
