Craig Kirchner

Party Line

The huge brown poles stuck every half block 
connected everything with tattered wires 
veeing down the row-house alleys 
to Lincoln logs on the horizon – 
well Mannasota Ave. anyway – 
and then across the Atlantic.
 
They say the President 
will be able to talk 
to the Kremlin.
 
And now we’re squatting under our desks, 
facing away from the windows, 
heads between our knees in 
Mrs. Sinton’s third grade - 
Air Raid drill they called it.
 
I’d killed enough Germans and Japs with 
Vic Morrow-like machine-gun-cool 
in fox holes under those poles 
that they shouldn’t be a threat, - 
this enemy was politically different.
 
Checking out the upskirt on that cold hardwood floor 
I whispered to Linda Perry with her buck teeth 
and albino blonde hair that this was nothing 
to worry about now that we could talk 
to the Russians on the phone and all -
 
and then as an afterthought informed her that 
I would be majoring in political science 
in college, thinking it must be 
pretty big shit.

IMAX

Guarding against the of-late 
tendency to forget completely,
 
I sketched the past to scale 
on blue-checked graph paper,

putting into an overview perspective 
the best and worst iconic moments,
 
all tops of heads, shoulders and cleavage, 
accurate miniature snapshots,
 
not influenced by expression or words, 
no innuendo or facial tics,
 
just impartial history detailed from above, 
creating a rolodex dimension
 
for the bijou reality of the back 
of the mind, index-tabbed by category,
 
providing easy reference for the 
rem-sleep dreamer who provides the 3D quality,
 
plugs back in the bedroom brown eyes, 
do-me cheek bones, tongue-licked lips,
 
that ‘talk dirty to me’ voice 
that sucks inhibition from the room
 
in the third of our existences, 
the sepia toned stream of consciousness,
 
the cognac noir matinees 
where we’re always our nastiest,
 
most run-on, most relaxed.

Protest after the war

Everything tastes like chicken.
All the roses smell like shit.
Asparagus makes the endangered 
species list,
then mushrooms.
 
Electric buses from 
all over the continent
bring in the foodies.
Millions of white masks,
all movement is slow, 
tentative, 
alerts are posted red,
the sidewalk griddles the fallen 
like fried eggs.
 
Ten to a pen,
bile in the throat, 
gas in the lungs,
dreaming of cacciatore 
and open spaces, air conditioning 
and a sense of time.

sifting through the nuts

I’m sitting here on a humid
August Sunday afternoon
sifting through a can of mixed nuts,
wanting to write about 
‘sitting on humid afternoons’
and worrying about plagiarizing 
writers old and new
who have done similar.
 
What could I say 
that hasn’t been said,
or how could I know 
or not know?
Can I be content with 
‘I haven’t said it before’
at least on paper,
at least on a Sunday afternoon,
at least not in my underwear 
with a mouthful of pecans,
 
waiting as I seem to be
for evening to fall,
to produce something incomparable,
something so clearly original
that it will make the Planter’s man 
tip his top hat, perhaps 
even remove his monocle?