A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House
Phyllis Klein
Naming Grief
Kip’s sign Stop the Genocide letters painted
in red green & black, he stands there every Sunday for Gaza,
almost a fixture in front of Country Sun
with a mural of sunflowers on its alley side.
I want that too. I want coexistence. I want Obama to copter
onto the flat roof, shimmy down to where we stand,
drama of a hero on Cal Ave. I want him
to defang the acid in my windpipe, give me a hug.
And yes, I want truce, I want treaty, but Kip hates Harris,
Let the old order fail he says, & I hate him the way
he hates Harris & as if he is holding a rifle instead of a sign.
Suppose the stars are just our grief reflected back to us
I read in a poem. Each incandescent surge a laser arm targeting
our hearts. Is that why we can’t look up for too long anymore,
keep our distance, it’s too empty-frigid, & the mirrors could blind us.
We are in a dream, I’m telling him catastrophe and he’s
saying Let it come. I am cold sweat on a bed of nails.
Oh, stargazing was romantic when we were young, lying on blankets
in meadows after dark watching them shoot like phosphorous
champagne uncorked across the night. I want us to be wiser now,
we are grayer, definitely sadder—Kip laughs chill out,
you should believe in the good in people. I am sobbing lava.
All the heavenly bodies in graves dug with blood lust,
music lovers at a festival, hostages, entire villages blinking down
on us in silence, myriad eyes begging.
We know they’re not coming back. In another dream
Harris leads us forward—We’re not going back. We’re not
going back. But the stars don’t know our names or who we love.
Kip and me, two ways of heartbreak. We can agree it’s fear—
that planet too far from the sun, pulls us out of orbit. Without fear
we are everything beautiful. We are all the art in every museum. Until
fear’s wrecking balls batter us into ghosts, facing ourselves in a darkroom
under development. I watch the answer dissolve when light hits the negative.
Both of us trying to find a name for grief. He wants to be a troubadour
for peace. This week he says It’s so good to see a warm-hearted person.
He calls his sign colors of affliction. I am dragon of sorrow.
Phyllis Klein is the author of The Full Moon Herald (Grayson Books, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, The Minnesota Review, and SWWIM Everyday, among other journals, as well as in anthologies including California Fire and Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology (Story Street Press, 2020), Fog and Light: San Francisco Through the Eyes of Poets Who Live Here (Blue Light Press, 2021), and I Can’t Breathe: A Poetic Anthology of Social Justice (Kistrech Theatre International, 2021). A psychotherapist by profession, Klein lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series as a creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House. The plan is to continue for all 1460 days of the 47th American presidency.
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