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  • The Day Before the Day Before Thanksgiving, and: For Dan, After a Party, and: By a pool, between hurricanes
  • Jesse Lee Kercheval (bio)

The Day Before the Day Before Thanksgiving

In English 203, the sophomores do not know what napalm is, what Chicano means, or why— in a poem titled “Vacation, 1969”— “black children” would have a reason to “loot fire hydrants / under sinus gray skies.”

For 19-year-olds, 1969 is so last century, civil rights as distant as the Civil War & less interesting. I feel a human footnote, my voice the tiny type explaining things no one wants to know, each word dustier than the last. History a tomb & my life in it [End Page 14]

For Dan, After a Party
after Frank O’Hara

You do not always know what I am thinking. Last night in the chill spring air while I was talking nonstop about the war & the President & how he will be the ruin of us, it was love for you that set me

on fire. Isn’t that the way of things? What I want, I can’t have. Not peace or love. Not even a kiss. In rooms full of strangers, I think only of you. Put out your hand— what can you touch that doesn’t remind you of me? When the children come in on Mother’s Day with their tray of scones & coffee & you trail after— where would you be without my love? The weather, they say, is turning for the better & tomorrow will be unseasonably warm.

By a pool, between hurricanes

Destin is bursting, the dark green umbrellas on the beach 3 rows deep, the chair concessionaires raking it in, every window in every concrete [End Page 15] stack of windows lit at night—because nothing west of Pensacola is there anymore. Or barely is, one year after Katrina flooded New Orleans, leveled Pass Christian. But it is an ill wind, as they say, that doesn’t blow those tourist dollars another direction. The Destin beaches gleam sugar white, restored—the Corps of Engineers sucking up 40 million dollars in sand & 4 endangered loggerhead turtles to make room for those beach chairs, those sheltering umbrellas. But the breeze from the Gulf is soft as a young lover’s skin. The water softer still, as turquoise as Heaven in the dream I had last night where I was a turtle, the Gulf my world & all I had to do was swim.

Jesse Lee Kercheval

Jesse Lee Kercheval’s most recent books include Cinema Muto, a collection of poems about silent film (Southern Illinois UP), and The Alice Stories (U of Nebraska P).

“As a Baby Boomer who grew up in Florida during the moon race, I am seriously disappointed not to be vacationing on Mars this summer.”

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