David Chester
Communion
Playing poker Christmas Eve
in a Gulf Coast casino,
I'm stubbing out a cigarette
and sitting by a man
with tubes in his nose.
I read the other players:
they're old;
they have nothing.
I'm thirty-five and drawing
at an inside straight.
An inside-straight draw's better than nothing.
Thirty-five is better than old.
I light another Camel,
cough a cloud of angel hair
across the table, and as they stare
I feel like Jesus in a crèche,
feel the phlegm turn to tinsel
inside me, life bulbs
blinking on thin green wires
winding through my thorax--
in this Mississippi Vegas,
where spent locals, fraught
with polyps, lay-offs, compulsion,
bet that dice will roll back
years of abuse and regret.
I feel for them, but it's Christmas
and I'm here to capitalize.
Saturday Morning T.V. in the Pakistani Laundromat
On the corner
of Sixty-First Street
and Thirty-Ninth Avenue
in Woodside, Queens,
I alternately check
the cycle and the news
on the Indian Broadcast Network:
The washer
takes forty-one minutes
five quarters
will dry your towels
if you think you're Jesus
you'll be hanged.
The man in the yellow
network blazer smiles and turns
the page, reads how a woman
imprisoned five years
for remarriage without divorce
was released
then stoned to death.
The woman behind the counter
sees me watching, blushes,
drops a handful of coins
and rushes to snap off the television,
trailing a wake
of diaphanous mustard scarves.
I look away,
see my clothes dervish
behind the glass,
doubt she senses
I find a peculiar comfort
in systems so cut and dry.
Porch
Lounging on my pollen-
coated chaise the other day
I heard, to my left,
an ice cream truck
calliope playing
in the distance. The song
was only seven seconds
long, but had a definite
beginning, middle, and end
to it. I listened--
DA DA, da DA, DA,
DADA, da DA;
DA, da DA-DA-DA, DA, DA--
over and over
for ten minutes,
until my bony white cat
walked up and dropped
a gnawed robin
at my feet.
Something like close fire
snapped my head
to the right,
where I saw Butch,
the neighbor's Great Dane,
eyes glinting, pointing
his cherry popsicle at me.
Spring, I thought.
David Chester has poems forthcoming in The Quarterly and The Cape Rock. He views Barry
White's comeback as the strongest anti-apocalyptic omen of our time.
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