A Hero Addresses Hera

 

I can’t explain why I cry when I do

or why I get erect when I do.

How will I ever account for this life?

 

It was a release like I always wanted—

something like crying and something like sex,

swaying together in the kitchen.

 

And I can’t leave you alone,

though it rains between us every day.

The deluge comes in again,

wearing mommy and daddy masks.

 

I was a trespasser from the beginning.

I meet a woman and she gives birth to my replacement.

That’s how it’s always been—begrudged.

 

I’ve seen the last generation.

The women accept death better than the men.

The men see their replacements

in every face and every incident.

 

There is something that makes me fly

like a bullet down the sidewalks,

keeps me busy and unkind.

 

You catch me, cling

through my sprinting and kicking.

You kiss my legs,

though it would take a million kisses to make them relax.

 

Everyone needs interference.

A tyrant needs it more than most, more than I can admit,

needs something like crying and sex at the same time,

when the burden of being alive overflows

and reveals itself as love.

 

 

In the Long Shadows

 

You forgot a few things

back when everything you touched turned to gold.

But they’re coming back now.

 

God, like the World Trade Center,

wasn’t all that noble

or even interested in nobility

until after it was gone.

 

Six months later, the city

is still a mass of delay and police tape.

 

No one is afraid to long for what doesn’t exist.

But it takes real courage and vulgarity to desire

what has happened, and what happens now.

 

There’s blood on the parking lot

where you make your stand.

And you are obligated to the lightning

you have caught.

 

Your triumphs turn to crimes here.

And your highest hopes wind up lower than murder.

A war surrounds you, seeks you,

who will not acknowledge it.

 

 

I-40 to Flagstaff

 

Sunglasses on my eyes,

a seatbelt across my heart and the stereo in my ears.

I say I want to be free.

But I can’t get comfortable.

 

Smears on the windshield, can’t find the cupholder,

pump the brakes for the traffic cop.

Death feels near, and freedom

hardly deserves the name.

 

I buy beer at the Pay-and-Take

by the Church of the Praying Indian

where white men ride motorcycles,

trying to go native.

 

On the mountainside, I listen long and drink deep

of silence’s whistle-ring-hiss.

The stars wave off my alibis,

absorb my rage and reciprocate the rest.

 

 

The Killer Taunts

 

Illuminating upward, the sun’s last rays

Grasp at the strings of cloud turned gray.

Traffic is lazy tonight.

There’s boredom in the traffic light.

And still, the killer taunts,

Worse, it seems, than he once did.

He says there’s something he wants,

Something he’s wanted since he was a kid.

 

But the thing he wants, he can not command.

The world, despite him, continues to stand.

He watched the cabs and cops—

American cars with lights on top.

While for us, the most reassuring news

Is that our beloved bomb is just an endless fuse.

 

So how will the homeowners resist?

Whose dreams have been so caution-kissed,

Whose yawp heaved, but weaved itself

Into the jungle of jingles in their stomachs.

The killer skipped among buildings disemboweled,

Spilled from their foundations, each and all.

The sun shone through the broken walls.

And fortune howled.

 

 

Law in the Bar

 

The bartendrix looks at me

out of the corner of her eye.

 

She is a fierce mommy.

And she’s keeping track of our sins.

Her goodwill accumulates and erodes

in quick, successive waves.

 

In another age, she’d be firing

arrows from a chariot.

She knows as much.

 

“You don’t have to apologize to me,” she says,

firing a rain of arrows.

 

“Thank god my parents beat me,”

the rest of the bar says in chorus.

 

Check the checklist:

X Missing work because of drink

X Alienating friends because of drink

X Drinking alone

 

A nearly infinite fall from what passed as grace

into the massive solitudes of space.

 

Billie Holiday sings

“Ain’t Nobody’s Business,”

on the jukebox.

 

And I linger among the last of them

who wouldn’t ask her

to recant.

 

 

 

 

Colin Dodds grew up in Massachusetts and completed his education in New York City. His poetry has appeared in more than a hundred fifty publications, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. The poet and songwriter David Berman (Silver Jews, Actual Air) said of Dodds’ work: “These are very good poems. For moments I could even feel the old feelings when I read them.” Dodds is also the author of several novels, including WINDFALL and The Last Bad Job, which the late Norman Mailer touted as showing “something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.” And his screenplay, Refreshment, was named a semi-finalist in the 2010 American Zoetrope Contest. Colin lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Samantha. You can find more of his work atthecolindodds.com.