The Last Time They Said “This Is No Drill” at Pearl Harbor
I feel bad about the gentleman who pushes
the emergency alert button.
He suspects he won’t get Employee of the Month
and lumbers past his cubicle
as slowly as a brained coconut crab.
Thirty-eight minutes to cancel the warning
and convince smeared beachcombers
poking each other like jellyfish corpses
that Kim Jong-un isn’t crashing the luau
with an ICBM and a case of Cristal.
Ukulele strings plonk and snap.
Tiny pink umbrellas scuttle across ivory sand.
Fountains of honeymoon semen splutter dry.
Imagine all the pigs impaled ass through mouth
for nothing while forty feet below, the Arizona
waves a diver toward Gun Turret No. 4
where he tucks bagged ashes. Barnacle-crowned,
her silences corroded, she weeps oil bubbles
from fuel tanks, black tears which will stain
the surface until the final crewman dies.
The Poet Vanishes
I track your chewed grin from a snorting crown
about Boudicca and smash headlong
into the disappearance date, this year-old wall
I envision strangled beneath trumpet vines.
Everyone claims you threw a grabbed elbow
at the party as your clammy lover’s Moscato
breath gusted you purseless off the lanai.
Should I join the Facebook vigil crowd
whose bug-eyed emojis pray for amnesia?
They rearrange the bouquet of hotline numbers.
They monitor your quirky blog hushed
after the first snowfall because there’s a chance
you’re teaching Kumin in the rain forest.
Poets never look like their poems.
This one ends with you wearing a tunic
as blue as a cornflower clasped
by a golden brooch, and your fearless glare,
and the sword, the bloody sword.
Contributor’s Note
Camouflaged by a married name, you slither
out of the journal toward sepia distances, finger
trapping an epiphany against your lower lip.
Congratulations on the Sappho dissertation.
It only took seven years. Your fangs straightened, too,
and freckles climbed the loose, dizzying cleavage.
Choppy blonde bangs smoothed and darkened.
Thank you again for sharing meaningful rent,
fiery Tom Yung Goong, and closet space
where my shirts drifted into the litter box like leaves.
Often, I self-interview: Would a new dresser
have delayed the inevitable? I wasn’t allowed
to rejoice in your talent or even to covet it.
You wanted me to hate it, but I miss thumbing
through your vulva villanelle, agonizing
together over that hot chick from Lesbos
who hopped unrequited off cruel white cliffs.
Just admit you always loved her more than me.
Maybe, as she promised, someone will remember us.
A Song Outside the Christian Science Reading Room
Pain may be real.
Mist is real, sponging the lindens, but lazily,
like Girl Scouts washing cars.
Do you realize a toothache
might kill someone’s daughter?
If an abscessed cavity gobbles
her brain’s stingy Neapolitan scoop,
we must entertain death as the only idea
she never got out of her head.
There’s something else: the President
and the Speaker rising like zombies
from adjacent salon sinks, hair wet,
noticing each other, they’d be so tickled.
You didn’t want a poem like this.
Me, neither. Sometimes we forget
heaven and hell are states of mind
and bullfrogs pluck their untuned banjos
in the dark loud enough to startle us.
I fell the best I could after slipping
on the sprinkler-slickened sidewalk.
The frogs climbed a perfect octave.
They chirped alarms. No substance but spirit.
An ache joined them above my knee,
strumming tirelessly ever since.
Call and Response
Little sister frowns at the field’s edge
and dips one foot past its weedy fringe
as if testing the snow-brushed grass for warmth.
The older girl zigzags ahead like a bony winter rabbit.
Her nose wriggles toward bakery bread.
An evening chimney scents the curtain of sleet.
How gracefully the storm flicks its wrist,
spreading a mulberry tree like a white silk fan!
They find big sister stiffening against the trunk,
throat slit ear to ear like a second smile,
hands knotted behind by blue-flowered panties
blooming through frost. The city bought her stone
so granite scrolls would curl like bobbed red hair.
Some claim the killer, never caught, joined her
in the same cemetery where she tells him off
namelessly and he snickers, refusing to apologize.
***
Photography Credit: Jason Rice
Rick Viar’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Roanoke Review, Naugatuck River Review, New Ohio Review, Rumble Fish Quarterly, The Sandy River Review, and The American Journal of Poetry. He lives in Virginia.
