THE CRITIC WRITES POEMS: SHERI REDA

FOUR POEMS:

1516 North

All the paisans know a guy and all

the paisans remember when

and everyone’s open secret threads through

the Viagra Triangle, wedged in

the crotch of Old Town and the Gold Coast,

where eyebrows-up Indianans hunker down

with hangers on still mocking the hippies

who cleared out forty-five years ago.

No one’s actually played that triangle

since around the time Miss Prentiss

with her kind smile and her flats and no time

to teach you how to make a diamond

quit to get married. I’m sure you’re right

she must’ve lost her looks, like you.

If she came down here like you she’d have to

buy half a dozen drinks for the Gold Coast

boob jobs just to get a grin, do a thousand

words for no action, even though it’s late

Sunday night and the bar’s closing

and Tony’s smile’s gone blank and the hostess

who’s bland as a kindergarten teacher

is banging dishes and turning off TVs

and turning up lights and turning locks

and gazing past the bar like a skinny gorilla

picturing life beyond one glass or another.

But kindergarten Miss didn’t give a shit

in a different way from the not giving

going on around here. This not

puts out the lights before you’re through,

and no one’ll remember you were there.

Urgent Questions of Autumn Leaves

I shiver and cringe before the blow. And you?

Do you blush, bruise, or ripen

after your flowers and fruits have gone?

Are you wielding this autumn light

or does it slam into you and bounce away?

Is your shimmer a shimmy, a whisper, a sigh?

Are you liberated or amputated by the weight of rain?

That spin and flutter—capitulation or surrender?

Panic or dance or panic and dance?

I want to think you jostle for a breeze. Fling yourself

into a good clean kick. Cackle at the satisfying crunch of chaos,

the breaking apart of your old dead bones. Maybe not.

Maybe you’re dismayed to be popular now

with slugs. Do you despise their worrying wriggles

or do you find a home at last? Is this ground zero

or ground of being? Are you going or letting go?

If I stay and watch you ride the wind,

Will you whisper to me the way?

The Night

Cold slaps on again like latex­­, another blizzard

scours the pigeon-cote sky. Sickroom blue gone ashen

shivers down from dirty rafters­. Particulates

split, drift, sparkle on our kids’ extended tongues.

Poison, yes—but how can we confess, this moment

a glimmer of ghost dance for the ripening days

grandma packed us all in a taxi to pick mulberries

growing in the prairie she called her friend's backyard.

Even then, we cabbed it. No skipping, traipsing,

gallivanting in pinafores through knee-high weeds

making pathways nobody had trod before: we were modern.

Took the nighttime shimmer of fireflies for granted.

Hammered ragged nail holes into the lids of mason jars.

Captured frogs and let ’em dry. Say, anyone here

seen a jumpfrog lately? Not the saucy poster frogs

making the circuit of nature museums, or the catalog frogs

you can order in bulk and slit open, belly to jaw.

Or the five-legged flukes, lunging and falling and lunging

sidelong in burning bogs. Not those, but the hearty bulls

who advertised their longing, who puffed up

and peed in your berry-stained hands—they’re gone

so suddenly—who’ll tongue and swallow the night?

Your Sleep

Tiny diamonds the droplets of sweat erupting 

on your forehead, the hairs of your neck. I’ve already curled them 

up into the cup of my tongue. Swallowed. Begun to bleed.

I thought I bought—turns out you can ask for what you want

but you always buy something else. Who funds this stuff?

Where’s the profit in it? By which I guess I mean, why?

Sufis say it’s the wrong question, but it’s the one 

I’ve got, the single keyhole lock set firmly in the panel door 

I drag along my bumpy life, banging it out 

against my spine, jerking my shoulder sockets 

out of place. Hanging on to the knob with one hand 

because it curves in my palm like a clue. I know 

there are locks galore and some of ’em twist easily 

in the hand. But why reminds me of doors I remember, 

doors that seemed to swing open into rooms. If I’d planned 

for this I might’ve packed my pockets full of rubber doorstops. 

Let ’em bulge suggestively against me in the rhythm of my gait. 

Caused a sensation. Anyway this door’s not exactly shut.  

I can prop its expert panels against one extruding surface 

after another, stand back and consider calmly, peek warily around 

in search of a skeleton key. Though I find only phantoms and bones 

strung up in the corner of a codger’s classroom, the very sticks 

clambering bit by bit out of  you. 

You know, diamonds are crystals. Like salt. 

Like the salt in sweat. Like the pillar of salt collecting 

in my gut, curdling me unwary and unwanted 

on the cabbage I was born to crave. Maybe a secret 

was in the hinge swinging open and shut. The light 

beckoning, receding, reappearing. The sense I once had 

that nothing is lost. But the hinges are lost. And I stay,

defining madness, because what else is there—

*****

Sheri Reda is a writer, editor, and performer who makes her living writing and facilitating ceremonies, serving as a youth services librarian, and taking on other projects as they arise. A storyteller who performs her narrative work at live lit venues throughout the Midwest, Sheri also serves as a member of the narrative medicine committee at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital and contributes to programming at the Jung Center of Evanston, Illinois. Her chapbook of political poems, entitled Stubborn, was published in 2017 by Moria Press.