Ronda Piszk Broatch
Two Poems
Where There is No Hope, One Must Invent Hope
When my bleary eyes pull heart blade
from hearth side, I think of Job – let my cry
have no resting place. I believe the rain
has read this news. As has the onion,
the president’s voice, the lash of black-
berry vine, bitterest lemon, the gravesite
carnation still whole weeks after. Suffering
has a keen scent, an over-extended autonomic
nervous breakdown. I imagine
Elie Wiesel at the Wailing Wall.
I think the rain cares nothing for the news.
The news reaches its inky fingers into my heart
searching for something sharp. Wearing safety glasses
when cutting an onion leads to dreams
of dissection, a fear of infinity. I think if this
country gets any kinder or gentler,
it’s literally going to cease to exist. The fathomless
black hole of chaos weeps at the news
it may soon be usurped. Blackberry vines
protect even the bitterest of blackened hearts.
Suffering locks the knife drawer.
Self, I see you reading between the lines—
the ouroboros cannot wail with its tail in its mouth.
Lacking a head, it’s just a tail. Camus tells us,
Là où il n’y a pas d’espoir,
il faut inventer l’espoir. In a black hole,
every blade returns to its sharpest beginnings,
holds hands with suffering. I wander
the news of a morning, all my sorrows curled
in a puddle at my feet.
When You Don Your Macro-Self-Glorification Fedora, I Grind My Clay Pigeons, Shredded My Thistle-Pained Pages
I’m sorry for this sad-ass country, sawed-off 3 am Twitter tweeter eclipsing all the good news yet to be had. I regret I didn’t clip my toenails before the hike, scrambling boulders to reach Heart Lake in the rain, that I lied when my old boyfriend asked me if I voted for Reagan. My favorite pundit never had a nebula, but I’m sure he blew a pinwheel, pinned a yata to the ISS before it traversed the heavens in hopes of finding some sort of intelligence seemingly void on our own planet. When I disposed of the narcissus bulbs, the narcissist blowing up Twitter because he didn’t win re-election, didn’t lead in the polls, but instead led an insurrection, I crashed the party where the muscles of my back revolted and squeezed the last nerve I have left. The June moon and Smokey the Bear couldn’t advise me how to punctuate this shit show—the one where a guy dressed as a moose, and hundreds of others dressed as themselves stormed the halls of Congress, putting their dirty boots on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, and stole a plinth while smiling at someone’s iPhone camera. My menorah is one candle short of Hanukkah, and my tragic flaw is your velvet manta ray, your mantra to the universe where every beanie baby is released from the dark cavity of your mother’s dresser drawers. I dreamt the whole ball of wax, cats multiplying before my eyes, the chalk-lined and the side-lined, how you opened for Ted Nugent, and took up the bow and arrow. In my next life I will learn to fly again, and this time I’ll get it right. My chi is stuck between my clavichord and my clavicle, and my sternocleidomastoid is equal to X most of the time. I will never understand the quantum levels of Planck lengths you will go to keep your position as narcissist in chief but am happy to visualize you in orange brighter than your painted on tan. I’m not sorry to imagine a world without you, Mr. Never-was-my-Prez. I think the ISS has a trick hatch, and the hinges are working just fine.
—Submitted on
Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press, 2015), Shedding Our Skins (Finishing Line Press, 2008), and Some Other Eden (Finishing Line Press, 2005). Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Diagram, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and other journals. She lives in Washington State.
SUBMIT to Transition: Poems in the Afterglow via our SUBMITTABLE site.
If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value Poems in the Afterglow, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.
