FIVE POEMS by Kenneth Tanemura
Chronicle
The Asian man on the subway punches back at the assailant, his punches pound in a flurry like wingbeats of saw-wings or swallows the softness of his swings like clarinet concertos, more mood than thrust, hinting at romance two lovebirds chattering under the same lavender umbrella on an afternoon of summer rain, the fast and slow pace of such talk then unexpectedly going into the depths of hope, hands fluttering like wings to gesture this, that, fear, longing before swooping up again into the lighter register of shared remembrances no threat and the punches don’t land, he’s not a fighter, just a commuter on the subway with a backpack packed with pencils and paper, a novice in the city, the country, the subway with crisscrossing lines across five boroughs, thrust into a new role suddenly a man- at-arms with short arms wailing and bewailing, who can say what the intended target was his thrust-forward hand missing the assailant’s head by a mile, his narrow wrist resting on the attacker’s shoulder as if pausing and loafing there as the assailant backs away from the punch so the punch pierces only air deflated the moment the assailant takes advantage of, thrusting the long arm of his rage into the foreign-looking man’s face, into the face of a virus raging across the planet beyond the city the country limits into the far-flung immeasurable unknown loathing the untold and undisclosed, contours erased by shadow, a stargazer loathing the unrevealed stars his eyes seething with no trace of Iago’s malicious irony, his eyes boiling incensed even after the Asian man predictably passes out, but there is courage in going against the fury, in emerging from the untold and telling the clear chronicle of himself. Jackknife
He kicks the Asian woman in the middle of her body, a body he maybe suspects transports a virus conceived overseas, suspects she’s spreading it all over the place like bats, like she ran the marketplace selling live animals, he kicks, and she folds in half, a jackknife, if it wasn’t an attack, I’d have thought of Greg Louganis from an era before such blows were crimes folding and unfolding before slicing into the water, a razor striking into the cool blue pool, but the Asian woman doesn’t unfold crumples to the ground, her dyed black hair off the ground in grainy footage a sign she’s still aware maybe can gather herself, but doesn’t before a kick with the left foot into her temple sends her not to the ground but to the moment of gathering before she gathers herself, to the moment when she is kicked again now, not going down but raising herself on hands and knees, the man done for now, making his escape and when he’s clear of view the other men, who watched from behind windows wheel the revolving door all their machismo cultivated for nothing for posturing but not protecting, for taking offense but not stopping the offenders, and they check to see how much blood, bruises how and how, the cowardice of men who fear, work, know guilt, repent for looking the other way, is all we know to judge; we know them they are us on days when the ridges and peaks in the sky seal us off from others until we’re so far apart they seem to live in a different sphere with more electrons and ionized atoms and molecules while the man on lifelong parole thinks the rules don’t apply to him, and they don’t, we don’t know what to do with those dead eyes, those lifeless eyes in the sockets of the man who kicks and kicks against the living as if anger was a shallow emotion and fear lay way down in the depths where only the most human of us wait. The Nothing
The Asian woman past middle-aged is slow and why not, strolling uphill in sunglasses, walking her dog on a Saturday morning, a little exercise to keep the blood pressure from rising in mutiny against the citadel of good health, to keep the cholesterol low as it was in her youth, the street all houses and trees de-populated of people or pedestrians like forests deforested for mines and malls, and with all the logic of the deranged the attacker gets a full head of steam, springs with long swift strides into a sprint her hands swaying at her sides to propel her forward common- sense machinations of the body whose mind’s unreasonable devices throw her off rhythm, she dashes towards the Asian woman with a knife in her hand, gallops with hardly a sound of footsteps approaching, nimble-footed and clumsy of mind, the attacker is described as a transient and reminds us of life fleeting, of the sprightly strategies of the mad who threaten and are threatened by their minds. Did she play it out in her thoughts, the running start, the surprise surprise moment of stabbing and stabbing then walking away calmly? It could have been an old harmless woman of any race attacked, but who’s more harmless? Who’s older than these women with blank expressions, as if they saw a thousand years go by a thousand years ago and now walk in enlightened passivity having seen the pyramids and Pompeii? Who’s more harmless than these women with no soul or backbone, born of cultures without guns weakened under the yoke of Confucius? “Like shooting fish in a barrel,” and when I was a kid I did, not shoot but fish for fish trapped for children to trap with poles and hooks. The trapped trout were easier targets than the wild trout darting through currents in a river and rejecting your lure knowing better than to bite on a shiny scrap of metal polished in a boy’s soft unknowing hands. I wonder if it’s culture, brute force against a truce with fate playing out on the street? All-out aggression versus tranquil meditation. No, it’s just the mind playing dirty tricks on some of us, voices telling some of us to attack, the tormented mind speaking and listening and arguing with itself until some flagrant solution is reached, and the Asian woman becomes a foil, her face as if she thought no thought and so a little less human for thinking nothing. The canceler walks away like nothing no longer there and she isn’t, she walks away before the residents appear shaking their heads. Polo Pony
Asian woman, as if he needed to align himself to handle her oh my god. The small voice comes at a lower volume, he feigns walking away, three steps then stops, turns, playing with his prey. He’s not leaving just yet. He thrusts his big, open, American hand in the air to make a point and a threat at once. Why don’t you go back to Asia, the man says, as if to register his complaint in the annals of American thought. Go back, make the return—to where, there? —everywhere there are men like this, you can’t escape them coming or going. He blurts out his full name, the middle name dangled there, some sanctioned ticket to rant and berate. The man blurts out his social security number and date of birth, the scared woman’s camera census-taking, identifying. He dares her to call the cops, as if color would not make them infer this, that, the little polo pony above his forehead a kind of badge. No one’s gonna help you, he says. No one sees these look-alike foreigners and sojourners here briefly under the radar, no one cares about either of them standing off here in El Taurino, the smell of tacos wafting in the taut air. One used against the other, you don’t forget his stare you don’t forget his voice, a woman says and the other, the woman, yes, it’s the woman he hates, the woman in the foreigner and not the foreigner itself, the woman who rejects, like the law the fat, outraged, over the hill woman-hating man, milling about, his body slouched and cocked for a fight. Warble
the corner, the one with yellow flowers painted on it and somewhere in a museum hangs Van Gogh’s sunflowers, the admiring eyes of the beautiful bestowed stiffly in the vestibule of aesthetic space, portico for the mind that rejects the world for art, and entrance to an elsewhere, when a man in a hoodie, hands at his waist, thrusts his hips into the shove he gives the old man who goes flying almost comically, airborne like Jordan in the 90s, leaping for a dunk from the free-throw line, nostalgically the old man falls flat on his face, unable to get up of his own volition as the assailant walks away pumping his left fist in the air in triumph as if, his point having been made, he’s done with the business at hand. This happened to me, many years before the pandemic, a middle school boy walking the halls of John F. Kennedy Junior High in the Reagan years but there were no smartphones, and even if there were, there was no one to see childhood being warped on video, the woof sounds coming from their mouths in stereophonic sound, the sounds decades from registering on a graph or gauge. Even the idea of recording the event by the seismographic network of a poem unthinkable as the internet and its cultures of vultures descending on Van Gogh, on the sunflowers growing in clusters. I was an easy target at 12, no less easy to attack than the man made nameless by his race, as we remain unknown and unsung. So let us croon carols now and warble until dawn. |
