Poetry |

“Mafia Myth” and “Midlife Aubade”

Mafia Myth

 

 

In the town there are townspeople

 

There is night and there is day

 

 

This is never not the case

 

There can be a bakery in the town

 

 

And a dry cleaner and a mayor’s office,

 

and a car wash

 

 

It’s up to you

 

It’s your town

 

 

You could be a mother You could

 

be a son You could be

 

 

principal of a junior high school

 

You get the gist. Pistol cocked

 

 

a vigilante hunches

 

in a crowd The medic sutures

 

 

whichever wound next needs tending

 

Remember there is light

 

 

and there is darkness. Every night

 

the townspeople

 

 

are cut down in their houses

 

or in the street But who

 

 

has time to mourn the dead

 

during daylight hours

 

 

even if you are a mother

 

Life goes on. There are decisions to make

 

 

the suspicious to put away.

 

No one wants the job

 

 

but there has to be a cop

 

in the town. There

 

 

is good town

 

and there is bad town

 

 

and the rules say only

 

the cop can tell which from which

 

 

which is never not the case.

 

 

[Note: Mafia is a party game created by Dmitry Davidoff in 1986 modeling the conflict between the informed minority (mafia) and uninformed majority (town, or innocents).]

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

Midlife Aubade

 

There’s a certain comfort
in knowing a bridge has stood

almost forever. There
long before the dawn’s first

foghorn blast — like one beast
lowing to another —

and before each ship I could describe now
with painstaking precision

that will glide slowly
underneath. Steel. Suspension wire.

Something in my life
should compare to these … Once

there was a bridge whose name
I never learned, under which

a small stream shimmered
the way a pond sometimes shimmers

for a moment, when a child flips a coin into it.
Tiny fish swam there. But the water

was like smoke. I thought,
nothing should have to live like this.

Contributor
Nathan McClain

Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017). His poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Green Mountains Review, Poem-A-Day, upstreet, and The Common. He teaches at Hampshire College.

Posted in Featured, Poetry

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