satellite dishes dot suburban lawns,
click code into unsuspecting homes.
Here is not anywhere close
to captions crossing television screens,
unconvincingly disguising our town
as Tulsa or Tuscaloosa
where the same two masked men
stick up a shiny gas station,
smile suspiciously into the eye
of the security camera.
Perhaps they are you
or your cousins traveling through
another state or time
into this 27-inch space
of otherworldliness, the familiar
and foreign switching uniforms
to the tune of Time and Temperature.
It is always snowing or raining
someplace like here
while our own windows lie
their pretend sunshine
on a street somewhat like yours.
Whom can we trust
when a smiling anchor
prophesies the utmost danger
around the corner
of tomorrow? Today, someone’s
floods will rise up
past the screen, our remote a small boat
of numbers, helpless with no
SOS in the making.
Brushfires will spark from antennae
hunching too close to our house
while hurricanes huff through wires.
We try to look outside
to our own doings, but all fingers
are frozen. No matter
what channel we pay,
there is still no news from home.
Best Friend
Hound Shoots Croatian Hunter
–Newspaper Headline; Jutarnji List Daily, 10/04
I could have told you, Spaso Ivosevic,
this is the way of all clichés on friendship.
If not your back, then your ankle,
the bullet path centimeters outside
your peripheral vision,
the pain, yes, unexpected, but as inevitable
as the woods’ lure, the joy
of the kill.
You’ll live but with a limp,
if you’re lucky, a scar
large enough to warn others,
yourself.
Sure, you tell me he was chasing
chickens, stormed past, for just a second,
turned those puppy eyes
on something else. Such loyalty,
you’d hate to put him down. What does it matter—
gun propped against the wall,
you, a veteran? I’ve heard it before,
typed up the medical reports
seconds before that other gunshot,
the one aimed for the head.
Safe
My baby and I stay home
from the funeral for the murdered child,
unrecognizably battered and stabbed
in last week’s news photos.
The police arrive early
at the church, the estranged wife
and husband, separated by rows of pews,
glare at photographers, suspect
each other. They have both
aimed guns. My husband lights
church candles around the girl’s enlarged
classroom photo, prays
for us. What is safe lurks
nowhere near, doubt encrypting
fear, the way we cross
ourselves in our cloistered home.
We stare nightly at neighbors
walking too close to the nursery window,
too close to the woods
where the girl was found,
her arms criss-crossed just so
as if by a parent who can
no longer sleep.
Fifth-grader Imagined Taking Over School
–Newspaper Headline; Wellsboro, PA
All the safe, small towns—
gas streetlights silly in retrospect—
proclaim surprise. What else
when their children’s open
veins stain the school tiles?
Here the cornstalks stay calm;
the cost-of-living low?
The
