Devil Dogs

by Brett Rutherford

Worst birthday yet,

rained-over, dark,

jostle of umbrellas

and the hiss of tires

on Sixth Avenue.

I have no money.

My two press helpers

will have to wait

if no check comes

from those who owe.

I am not sure

of dinner. The rent

is paid, just barely.

How anyone lives

in Manhattan

without a trust fund

is still a mystery.

Still, the press runs.

Papers pile up

for folding. A fast

hundred dollars

could walk in the door

at any moment.

I wonder about

the cast iron building

across from my loft.

Typesetters are there

with old linotypes,

printers like me

working late nights

sometimes. Do they

go through these

weekly agonies?

Probably.

When I stop the press,

Claudia and the other

are huddled together

at the window sill.

Matches are being lit:

what? smoking, here,

in this firetrap?

I go to see, and

"Happy Birthday!"

regales me.

"We had no money,"

Claudia tells me.

"But we

improvised."

I look down to see

candles, tiny,

twenty-five,

straddling two,

minuscule

chocolate

cylinders,

cake-pastry known

as "Devil Dogs."

I weep with joy

remembering.

My First Jewish Boyfriend

 by Brett Rutherford

New to the City, I am struck

by the beauty of young Jewish men.

Red-haired Princes of the City

they seem to me.

They know everything about everything.

The one I am most enamored of

I see at the opera in standing room,

at the cheap seats in Carnegie Hall,

in the library at Lincoln Center.

He notices I notice him. We talk.

His Ashkenazi genius is assured.

He knows the words to the operas,

as do I. He knows the difference

between one conductor’s Beethoven

and another’s. He shows me

the right restaurants, and where to shop

amid the delis and stores

of the Lower East Side.

After two dates, I am taken home

to meet Mother. Top of a high-rise

not far from Grand Army Plaza,

windows with a view to die for.

Mother regards my clothes with pity,

sparks up as we talk about poets

and Russian music. “Oh, well,”

she sighs, “I see why my son likes you.”

As she prepares dinner, he confides,

“Mother so disapproves of me.

We had painters in last month

and she warned them, said right

in front of me, ‘Pay him no mind.

You are not to speak to my son.

He is a homosexual and is not well.’ "

Then, whispered, “Of course I had sex

with all of them before a week had passed.”

I am introduced to matzos

and a chicken broth that was not

to be forgotten. The dinner was peppered

with questions about my family.

Each answer I gave was worse

than its predecessor, until I felt

I was the merest mongrel. I doubted

that dessert would come at all

as my family tree was no more than a shrub.

What business had such a prince

with a poet whose glasses

were taped together, whose clothes

were more clown than scholar?

He vanished after that. I called,

but he evaded me. Finally,

outside the opera, he said,

“Look, there’s something

I need to tell you. I’m not

any good as a friend to anyone.

You don’t want to know me.

I was sent away to an asylum.

My mother had me committed.

It was all I could do

to talk my way out of that place.”

I assured him I did not care.

There was nothing wrong with him,

and a great deal wrong with his mother.

“I can’t see anyone,” he answered,

head drooped as he walked away.

“No one should want to know me.”

Months later, a man comes up to me

as I lean on the rail in standing room.

“I know you liked Michael,” he begins.

My head turns enough to see

this is no one I know. “I saw you

together, and more than once.

You’ll want to know he killed himself

about three weeks ago.”

Autumn Sundays in Madison Square

by Brett Rutherford

This poem is based on journal notes across a number of years, from the days when I lived near Madison Square Park. It was then in rather decrepit condition. I post this older poem today as a little demonstration of craft. People who think that all unrhymed poetry is just prose, and that "free verse" requires no discipline, need to look closer. This poem pulses and "breathes" because its line alternate between 10-syllable lines and 8-syllable lines, an alternation, if you will, between the formality of blank verse and the songfulness of the ballad measure. The enjambment across stanzas also forms a hook between them, so that the seams of the poem are not obvious. The allusion to "Liberty" is that the arm and hand of the Statue of Liberty stood for a time at the north end of Madison Square Park while funds were being raised for the completion of the statue.


Stately old sycamores, sentinel oaks,
     fan-leafed gingko and noble elm,
year by year your patient quest for the sun
     has sheltered such madmen, squirrels,
birds, bankers, derelicts and poets
     as needed a plot of peaceful
respite from the making and sale of things.

Poe lingered here in his penniless woe.
     Melville looked up at a whale cloud.
Walt Whitman idled on the open lawn.
     (Sad now, the ground scratched nearly bare,
Fenced off against the depredating dogs;
     the fountains dry, while standing pools
leach up from old, sclerotic water mains.)

Four chimes ring for unattended vespers,
     no one minding the arcane call,
not the bronze orators exhorting us,
     not the rollicking hounds unleashed
in the flea-infested gravel dog-run,
     not the grizzled men in boxes,
so worn from the work of all-day begging

they’re ready to sleep before the sun sets.
     A thousand pigeons clot the trees.
The northwest park is spattered with guano,
     benches unusable, a birds’
Calcutta, a ghetto a bloated squabs
     feasting on mounds of scattered crumbs,
bird-drop stalagmites on every surface!

Daily she comes here, the pigeon-lady,
     drab in her cloth coat and sneakers,
sack full of bread crusts, and millet and rice,
     peanuts and seeds from who-knows-where.
Still she stands, in the midst of offerings,
     until they light upon her shoulder,
touching her fingertips, brushing her cheeks

with their dusty, speckled wings, naming her
     name in their mating-call cooing,
luring her up to lofty parapets,
     rooftop and ledge, nest precipice
where, if she could fly, she would feed their young,
     guard their dove-bright sky dominion
from hawks, the heedless crowds, the wrecking cranes.

Across one fenced-in lawn the sparrows soar
     in V-formation back and forth,
as though they meant in menacing vectors
     to enforce the no-dog zoning.
Amid the uncut grass the squirrels’ heads
     bob up, vanish, then reappear
as the endless search for nuts and lovers

ascends its autumn apogee. But here
     the squirrels are thin and ragged,
road-kill reanimated harvesters,
     tails curled like flattened question marks
as every other morsel offered them
     is snatched by a beak or talon.
Descending birds make calligraphic curves

as branches twine in spiral chase of sun.
     Nothing is safe from scavenging —
trash barrels tipped for aluminum cans,
     the ground beneath the benches combed
for roach-ends the dealers crush and re-sell
     to law clerks and secretaries.
Even the cast-off cigarettes are taken

by derelicts and nicotinic birds.
     Certain my notes are tracking him,
a storm-tossed schizophrenic darts away.
     Beside the World War’s monument
(ah, naïve time, to conceive no second!)
     an Asian woman gardening
adds green and blossom to the shady ground

amid the place-names of trampled Belgium,
     forest and trench of invaded France.
(Not her war, certainly, not her heroes,
     yet her soft blooms, as from a grave
whisper the names of the now-dead warriors
     and sons who never come to read
of Ypres, Argonne and the barbed-wire lines.)

A welcome bookstall has opened its doors,
     as if to lure the passers-by
to read, to dream, beneath the timeless elms —
     but who can sit, immersed in book,
as suicidal leaves cascade, as hands
     shaking and thin, trade crumpled bills
for bags of bliss in crystal, crack or powder?

Is this the potter’s field of shattered dreams?
     The copper arm of Liberty
once stood at the northern end of the square.
     The trees once soared. Now roots eat salt,
brush against steam pipes and rusted cable,
     cowed by courthouse, statues frowning,
Gothic and Renaissance insurance spires.

Only the branches, forgiving, forgetting,
     redeem this purgatory place.
A Druid stillness draws here at dusktime,
     squirrel and bird and runaway
equally blessed as the hot-ash sunset
     gives way to the neon-lit night,
city unsleeping beneath the unseen stars.

—New York City/ Weehawken/ Providence
1996/1998/2001

The Vampire Victims' Club - A Short Short Story

by Brett Rutherford

I meet a group of middle-aged ladies at the diner. I cannot tell you their names, or what they look like. I am good at details, but I cannot describe them. Except that there are four. I don’t even see them sitting there at first until one of them calls my name.

Once I am seated, the waitress comes over. She gives me a menu.

One of the women says, “May we have menus, too?”

The waitress starts, says, “Oh my goodness, I didn’t see you all sitting there. Just a minute.”

The women tell me this happens all the time. “We feel invisible,” one says.

I joke about us all getting older. But honestly, I cannot tell one from another. They are middle-aged, nondescript. Only their differently-colored coats mark them apart.

“It’s not that. It’s because of him,” one says. They all nod.

What we are here to talk about is that they have a Meetup group. It’s called The Vampire Victims’ Club.

The founder tells me that they first met when one of them placed an online ad asking:
Has a famous celebrity sucked your blood? Me too, let’s talk.

Soon six were in touch, but all afraid to meet. They knew there were others, so the four brave enough to meet in person started this Meetup group with the more generic name, The Vampire Victims Club.

“We got a lot of Goth girls at first. To them it was play. You know, bad boyfriends who cut them with knives, or used a little dainty syringe. Blood-dabblers.

“When they saw us, how we were pale without make-up. When we told them what anemia really was, and how we were slowly wasting away, well, off they went, back to their boys with little fake vampire teeth.

“What we all came to realize is that there’s only one in mid-town. ”

“One what?” I ask.

“Why, vampire, of course. It’s always him, him all the time. He must have driven the others like him away.”

“No one will ever believe you,” he says to all of us. “Oh, such alibis he has. His limo drops him off at some fancy club or fund-raiser. Then halfway through, he slips away, men’s room and then a back doorway. Then he’s a few blocks away at the kind of place a divorced woman or a single mother goes, dim-lit and quiet. Slow drinks and flirts. Married men who want a secret girlfriend, mostly. Or sad widowers – you hope to meet one of those with money.

“Then in comes Mister Billionaire, discreetly, hat drooping low in that pretend-you-don’t-know-who-I-am mode.

“So he buys you a drink, and you talk, and you pretend not to know who he is. And he flirts and you say Oh, come on now, I know who you are. You have your pick of all those showgirls. Porn stars even. Why do you want to hurt a poor girl’s feelings? And then he says he’s just enjoyed talking to someone who didn’t want to play sugardaddy games, and he felt very at home with you and would like to, you know, get to know you.”

“And all the time his limo is sitting outside the charity ball?” I ask.

“Oh, even worse. Sometimes his wife is sitting back there. You know, the famous model. And she’s looking at her watch and fuming, and putting on fake smiles and the little ‘who knows’ shrug when someone asks her ‘Where is your husband?’

“And over there, three streets away, he’s led you out through a back door and you think you’re going to be in his limo for a joyride around the island, maybe a bad time, or maybe a story you’ll tell your girlfriends about for years, or maybe, just maybe, he actually sees something in you …”

“And?”

“And instead you turn a corner into an alleyway and you say, “I don’t think we should walk this way.”

And he says, “Not to worry, I know this street like the back of my hand. And then you’re up against a brick wall all cold and clammy and he’s got your legs apart and think he’s going to. And then, no, he’s at your throat and it burns and surges and the life is going out of you. And then he stops, and laughs, and waves his hands in front of your face in a peculiar way and says, “Be here tomorrow. This place, at midnight. And he puts something in your purse, and when you look later, its enough to pay your rent for half a year.”

“Was it just once, then, I ask?”

Another woman chimes in. “It’s never just once. I’m his Monday victim.” Pointing: “She’s every Wednesday.”

“And I am Friday’s victim,” the first woman says. Every Friday. In that alley, three blocks from the most expensive restaurant in New York.”

“We’re just his cafeteria,” the fourth one chimes in. “I’m the youngest, as you can see. Weekends I have to wait, in a suite in his office tower, for whenever he can get away.”

“She’ll outlive the rest of us,” one says bitterly. “She just gets him through Sunday. He hardly takes a thimbleful. A snack.”

“Or maybe he’s grooming me to be his next wife,” says Number Four. “Like in the movies.”

In answer, dark laughter and the shaking of heads.

“And none of you have gone to the police? Is that why you invited me here, to get the word out?”

There is a long silence.

“Each of us has tried to go to the police. You see the station, the one on 57^th Street. You turn the corner. You start walking. Your steps get tinier and tinier. You’re walking like an old lady. And then you’re hanging on to a lamp-post, almost fainting. And you reel for a trashcan, vomiting.”

“I tried by phone. I dialed the police. When someone answered, all I could do was squeak, “I’m sorry. I made a mistake. I didn’t mean to call this number.’”

“Post hypnotic suggestion?” I speculate.

“The other thing is, mister, is that no one can see us. You noticed that when you came in. No one comes up to any of us and says, ‘You’re looking terrible. Let me get you to a doctor.’ It’s getting worse as the life drains out of us. When one of us dies, they might not even find our bodies, just husks behind the dumpsters, stuff no one would touch or even try to name.”

“I find that hard to believe.” I wonder if this was an elaborate hoax.

“Show him Mildred!” the third one intones.

“We were five originally,” the first explained. Her weary hands reach into a shopping bag. “Mildred was oldest, and weakest. Once, she was a Rockette, then a cocktail waitress. She was the first one he made a ‘regular.”

She pushes aside the coffee cups and menus, and lays a thing before me.

It smells of whisky, beer, sawdust and vomit, the reek of an alley behind a sodden bar.
Its mottled color is that of fungus, newspapers yellowed in cat urine, and soot.

It weighs almost nothing, the lint of laundromat, the clot of forgotten spiderweb, a bird’s nest.

It has no shape I can name, a tapestry of shreds and sticks and filth.

Except for the woman’s face dead center in its fractals of trash, it is nothing.

Nothing, nothing at all, I chant as I flee, stunned as though hypnotized, and when I look back the diner booth is empty.

Autumn Sundays in Madison Square Park

Stately old sycamores, sentinel oaks,
     fan-leafed gingko and noble elm,
year by year your patient quest for the sun
     has sheltered such madmen, squirrels,
birds, bankers, derelicts and poets
     as needed a plot of peaceful
respite from the making and sale of things.

Poe lingered here in his penniless woe.
     Melville looked up at a whale cloud.
Walt Whitman idled on the open lawn.
     (Sad now, the ground scratched nearly bare,
Fenced off against the depredating dogs;
     the fountains dry, while standing pools
leach up from old, sclerotic water mains.)

Four chimes ring for unattended vespers,
     no one minding the arcane call,
not the bronze orators exhorting us,
     not the rollicking hounds unleashed
in the flea-infested gravel dog-run,
     not the grizzled men in boxes,
so worn from the work of all-day begging

they’re ready to sleep before the sun sets.
     A thousand pigeons clot the trees.
The northwest park is spattered with guano,
     benches unusable, a birds’
Calcutta, a ghetto a bloated squabs
     feasting on mounds of scattered crumbs,
bird-drop stalagmites on every surface!

Daily she comes here, the pigeon-lady,
     drab in her cloth coat and sneakers,
sack full of bread crusts, and millet and rice,
     peanuts and seeds from who-knows-where.
Still she stands, in the midst of offerings,
     until they light upon her shoulder,
touching her fingertips, brushing her cheeks

with their dusty, speckled wings, naming her
     name in their mating-call cooing,
luring her up to lofty parapets,
     rooftop and ledge, nest precipice
where, if she could fly, she would feed their young, 
     guard their dove-bright sky dominion
from hawks, the heedless crowds, the wrecking cranes.

Across one fenced-in lawn the sparrows soar
     in V-formation back and forth,
as though they meant in menacing vectors
     to enforce the no-dog zoning.
Amid the uncut grass the squirrels’ heads
     bob up, vanish, then reappear
as the endless search for nuts and lovers

ascends its autumn apogee. But here
     the squirrels are thin and ragged,
road-kill reanimated harvesters,
     tails curled like flattened question marks
as every other morsel offered them
     is snatched by a beak or talon.
Descending birds make calligraphic curves

as branches twine in spiral chase of sun.
     Nothing is safe from scavenging —
trash barrels tipped for aluminum cans,
     the ground beneath the benches combed
for roach-ends the dealers crush and re-sell
     to law clerks and secretaries.
Even the cast-off cigarettes are taken

by derelicts and nicotinic birds.
     Certain my notes are tracking him,
a storm-tossed schizophrenic darts away.
     Beside the World War’s monument
(ah, naïve time, to conceive no second!)
     an Asian woman gardening
adds green and blossom to the shady ground

amid the place-names of trampled Belgium,
     forest and trench of invaded France.
(Not her war, certainly, not her heroes,
     yet her soft blooms, as from a grave
whisper the names of the now-dead warriors
     and sons who never come to read
of Ypres, Argonne and the barbed-wire lines.)

A welcome bookstall has opened its doors,
     as if to lure the passers-by
to read, to dream, beneath the timeless elms —
     but who can sit, immersed in book,
as suicidal leaves cascade, as hands
     shaking and thin, trade crumpled bills
for bags of bliss in crystal, crack or powder?

Is this the potter’s field of shattered dreams?
     The copper arm of Liberty
once stood at the northern end of the square.
     The trees once soared. Now roots eat salt,
brush against steam pipes and rusted cable,
     cowed by courthouse, statues frowning,
Gothic and Renaissance insurance spires.

Only the branches, forgiving, forgetting,
     redeem this purgatory place.
A Druid stillness draws here at dusktime,
     squirrel and bird and runaway
equally blessed as the hot-ash sunset
     gives way to the neon-lit night,
city unsleeping beneath the unseen stars.

With Poe on Morton Street Pier

One gloomy autumn night, I sat with my hand-scribbled poetry journals on Manhattan's Morton Street Pier. I had $4.50 to my name. It turns out that this was the pier where Edgar Allan Poe first landed in his New York adventure, which ended in lodgings nearby in Greenwich Village, and then near-starvation in the Bronx. The poem I wrote has been revised several times. Poets read on the piers on Sundays; at night, lonely men trysted there; you could sit alone, a solitary poet, watching the blinking lights on the Hudson, the night chill rising around you. The river lapped at the pier, and wanted you to hurl yourself in and end it all.

Sunset at the Manhattan piers: gray-black,

the iron-cloaked sky splays vortices of red

into the Hudson’s unreflecting flow.

Blown west and out by a colorless breeze,

the candle of life falls guttering down

into a carmine fringe above oil tanks,

a warehoused cloud of umber afterglow,

hugging the scabrous shore of New Jersey,

a greedy smoker enveloped in soot.

To think that Poe and his consumptive Muse

stood here in April, Eighteen Forty-Four,

his hopes not dashed by a rainy Sunday —

an editor thrice, undone, now derelict,

author of some six and sixty stories,

his fortune four dollars and fifty cents.

Did he envision his ruin, and ours?

Did his Eureka-seeking consciousness

see rotted piers, blackened with creosote?

Did rain and wind wash clean the Hudson’s face,

or was it already an eel-clogged flux

when he came down the shuddering gangplank?

Who greeted him? This feral, arched-back cat,

fish-bone and rat-tail lord of the landing?

Did he foresee the leather’d lonely wraiths

who’d come to the abandoned wharf one day

in a clank-chain unconscious parody

of drugged and dungeon-doomed Fortunato

and his captor and master Montresor?

He gazed through rain and mist at steeple tops,

warehouse and shop and rooming house — to him

our blackened brickwork was El Dorado.

He needed only his ink to conquer

the world of Broadway with his raven quills —

Gotham would pay him, and handsomely, too!

Did the lapping waters deceive him thus —

did no blast of thunder peal to warn him

that this was a place of rot and rancor?

The city shrugs at the absolute tide.

I am here with all my poems. I, too,

have only four dollars and fifty cents

until tomorrow’s tedium pays me

brass coins for passionless hours of typing.

I am entranced as the toxic river

creeps up the concrete quay, inviting me,

a brackish editor hungry for verse,

an opiate and an end to breathing.

Beneath the silted piles, the striped bass spawn,

welfare fish in their unlit tenements.

A burst of neon comes on behind me,

blinks on the gray hull of an anchored ship —

green to red to blue light, flashback of fire

from window glaze, blinking a palindrome

into this teeming, illiterate Styx.

Empire State’s cool spire, clean as a snow-cap,

thrusts up its self-illuminated glory;

southward, there’s Liberty, pistachio

and paranoid in her sleepless sunbeams,

interrogated nightly, not confessing.

It is not too dark to spy one sailboat,

pass by swiftly, lampless, veering westward;

one black-winged gull descending to water,

its quills immersed in the neon mirror.

Now it is dark. Now every shadow here

must warily watch for other shadows

(some come to touch, to be touched, but others —)

I stay until the sea chill shrivels me,

past the endurance of parting lovers,

beyond the feral patience of the cat,

until all life on legs has crept away.

Still, I am not alone. The heavy books

I clasp together, mine and Edgar Poe’s,

form a dissoluble bond between us.

Poe stood here and made a sunset midnight.

Poe cast his raven eyes into this flow

and uttered rhymes and oaths and promises.

One night, the river spurned his suicide.

One night, the river was black with tresses,

red with heart’s blood, pearled with Virginia’s eyes,

taking her under, casting him ashore.

One night, he heard an ululating sob

as the river whispered the secret name

by which its forgetful god shall know him,

his name in glory on the earth’s last day.

[Minor revisions May 3, 2019)

Hart Island

I wrote this poem about Hart Island, New York's "potter's field," a number of years ago, and it appears in my collection, Things Seen in Graveyards. This poignant article today in The New York Times revisits the island to ask what happened to the AIDS victims whose bodies were sent there. Even the dead were shunned and their coffins were piled up while workers were afraid to touch them. I wondered sometimes whether my flight from New York in 1985 was an over-reaction -- a vast majority of friends and acquaintances had died, and this article confirms that, noting that 100,000 died in New York during the peak of the epidemic, making up one quarter of the nation's victims.


Ferry cuts fog

in Long Island Sound,

baleful horn bellowing

a midnight run

unblessed by harbor lights,

unknown to sleeping millions

convicts at the rails,

guards behind them,

dour-faced captain at the helm

a face and a pipe

and a dead-ahead glare,

an empty gaze that asks no questions

offers no advice

A careful mooring,

cables thicker than hanging noose

bind ship to pier;

pilings like pagan columns

bind pier to Hart Island

Convicts shuffle to the end of the dock,

guards behind them with billy clubs

hands tensed at holster.

You fellas better behave now,

the captain mutters,

just do what you're told.

And no funny business, another voice warns,

'cause anything could happen to you here.

The prisoners shiver at moonless expanse

of blackened water,

dead shell of Bronx one way,

bedrooms of Queens the other;

clap their hands,

blow on their fingers

to fight the chill.

Guess you would freeze, one speculates

before you could swim to shore.

Just do what you’re told,

the biggest con admonishes.

I been here before. Do what

you’re told and then it's over.

Eager to earn

the early release,

willing to dig

and lift and carry,

they turn to the foreman.

He points to the tarp

that covers the cargo.

They lift the tiny oblong boxes,

frail as balsa

thin pine confining

the swaddled contents.

What's in these things?

one asks, taking on three

stacked to his chin.

Over there, is all the foreman says,

pointing to mounds

where a silent back hoe

stands sentinel.

These be coffins, the older con explains.

Baby coffins.

They lower the boxes

into the waiting holes,

read the tags attached to them:

Baby Boy Franklin

Carl Hernandez

Unknown Baby Girl, Hispanic.

The adult coffins are heavier,

two men at least to carry each one.

They can joke about these:

Heavy bastard, this Jose.

Carla here, she musta wasted away.

But no one speaks about the babies.

The convicts' eyes grow angry, then sad.

Later the mounds will be toppled,

the soil returned to the holes,

flattened and tamped

with a cursory blessing

by an ecumenical chaplain.

These are the lonely dead,

the snuffout of innocence:

crack babies

AIDS babies

babies dead from drive-by bullets

babies abandoned like unwanted kittens

dumpster children

No wonder this island cries in its sleep.

New York Times on Hart Island

Arabesques on the Statue of Liberty

A rapist on the Staten Island Ferry lusts after the Statue of Liberty. On Canal Street, a Chinese wife makes a break for freedom. And then King Kong and the Statue of Liberty switch places. A new revision of an old New York poem.

1

Bad Dingo rides

the Staten Island ferry

dusk till dawn,

clinging to rail,

nestling an all-night

tumescence,

hard at the sight

of the robed lady,

vast,

unapproachable.

He’s stalking her,

biding his time.

Some night

there’d be a fog,

a power failure.

He’d come up behind her,

prodding the small

of her spine

with his imperious knife,

jostling her bronze buttocks

with his ardent flesh prod.

She’d drop the tablet;

the torch would sputter.

He’d push her off her pedestal.

Bad Dingo would give it to her good

the way he did to all the white ladies

in parks and stairwells and subway cars.

This would be the rape of all rapes,

the pinnacle of his career,

the ultimate boast

“See that toppled goddess

in the harbor--

she ain’t so proud now

since someone had her,

made her moan.

Bad Dingo had her,

stuck it to the Statue,

white-lady Liberty!”

2

In Chinatown,

Mrs. Wang mounts

a quiet rebellion

against the ways of the elders.

She has done all

her mother asked her:

married the boy

the matchmaker ordained,

bore sons and daughters

in regular order

burned joss and incense

at every altar,

sending ghost gold and peaches,

phantom cars and televisions

Hong Kong Hell dollars

to the teeming, greedy dead.

Now her husband travels,

has mistresses, won’t talk

about his gambling.

Her children are gone,

married to foreign devils

Her round-eyed grandchildren

won’t learn Mandarin,

will never send joss riches

to her when she is dead.

Now she becomes a whirlwind:

She sells her jade and porcelain,

cleans out her savings account,

buys an airline ticket

for San Francisco —

from there, who knows?

She pawns the statuette

of pearly white Kuan-Yin,

the Goddess of Mercy

whose only blessing

was endless childbirth

and washing and ironing,

On a whim she buys another

to take its place at her bedside:

a foot-high Statue of Liberty

with batteries and glowing torch.

She leaves it for her husband,

her wedding ring

on its spiky crown.

3

Today two New York titans

switch places.

A grumpy Green Liberty

strides up Fifth Avenue,

crushing pedestrians in verdigris.

Her sandalled feet

send buses flying,

kiosks shattering.

Her great head turns

among the office towers.

She reaches in,

pulls screaming executives

through razor edge panes,

undresses them

with her copper fingers,

discards them one by one

to the pavement

twenty stories below.

The man she wants

is not among them. He’s got

to be a real American,

one of those Arrow short models,

blond, and a screamer,

a yielding but unwilling male

under her stern metallic nails.

The more he cries out, Put me down,

the more she likes him.

Uptown, she finds him:

a tousle-headed messenger,

scooped up from his bicycle.

She cups him in one palm,

drops her tablet,

rolls up her sleeves,

and starts the painful ascent

of the Empire State Building.

Downtown

on Liberty Island,

King Kong wields a torch,

incinerates all passing freighters,

capsizes the passenger ships.

He hurls great boulders skyward,

picks off incoming airplanes one by one.

He is guarding the harbor now.

He is a real American

and he shouts his slogans:

America First.

Stay out.

Go home.

No foreigners allowed.