Three Poems

by David M. Alper

Spin

Hum along like distant galaxies, orbiting their

silence. The child beside me—lace shoes untied,

stick-like arms—dispenses quarters into an open

mouth. Both of us are waiting for something to be

clean. Rain on the outside writes a tune on the

sidewalk. A mother wipes her son's face with her

sleeve, wiping in repeated stitches of time back onto

his face. Within, the dryer is afire with red flames, a

false sun that consumes our sins—last season's

socks, a shirt ripped by a hand no longer present.

My image in the glass cylinder is distorted—caught

between the whirls of sky and fabric. Listen closely,

and one can hear the prayers of the static electricity,

their plaintive wail to cling to something—

anything—within reach. When the machine dies, I

slide in my hand, heat spreading in my palm like

memory. The boy is gone. His shoes are left,

buckled under a bench. I exit. The rain ceased, but

the street still weeps in puddles. And clouds

above—boundless, rumpled sheets—will never be

wrinkled.

Remains

A shattered teacup, lost handle—its fracture worn

smooth with years, but still bearing the last smudge

of morning. A lone running shoe, laces trailing

behind, on the bed. Its partner was missing, but only

the dust that had settled like an elegy on the floor.

The jammed kitchen clock at 2:17—as if it had

struggled once to keep the hours back, to pin them

down. Three invisible cities on postcards. Stamps

were never mailed. Paris, Berlin, and Leeds—each

one an empty city. A discarded sweater carelessly

draped over the chair back, sleeves stretched tight

by a too-familiar body never to return again.

Parched flowers pressed between the pages of an

untouched book, their color sucked out of them—

like memories sucked of holding. And the stained,

misty mirror in its shaking gold frame, waiting,

longer than breath, for a face that has learned how

to remember how to forget to love.

On the List in the House of the Dead

  discontent

 in the heat of the day

        is part of things

             coming to terms with a painful impossibility

                  this misery conceals itself

        carried away by what love is

          what if you were thinking over the day

 and i was

           planning the great escape

           why progress

         why repent

                   we're trapped by this blue loneliness

                     fabricating the many losses

                despair

              on this unpromising day

  is a given

        shocked by the coldness of creation

        existence can't tell

       trying to deaden the anguish

            as the kid plays with play-doh

            sometimes it is like this

           it's a crime

          who's there to tell

     as i hear someone crying

               do you get it

BIO: David M. Alper's work appears in The McNeese Review, The Rush Magazine, The Fourth River, and elsewhere. He is an educator in New York City.