Waiting to be Rescued, and: Revenge, and: Cuba, My Brother, the Hangings

Waiting to be Rescued

There are two kinds of looting,the police chief explained.When they break into convenience storesfor milk, juice, sanitary products,we look the other way.

When they hijack liquor, guns,ammunition, we have to go inand get them even thoughwe've got no place to put them.

Hoard what you've got,huddle in the shade by day,pull anything that's looseover you at night, and waitto be plucked by helicopter,

saved by pleasure craft,coast guard skiff,air mattress, kiddie pool,upside down cardboard boxthat once held grapefruit juice

or toilet paper, and rememberwhat Neruda said: poetryshould be useful and usablelike metal and cereal.Five days without shelter,take whatever's useful.

Revenge

Victorian ladies once assembledinsects into bizarre collages,bugs in velvet-lined boxes, bugsartistically arrayed on plattersset on table tops, a fashionablepastime for the leisure class.

Was this a way to sublimatetheir rage? Denied the vote, denieddivorce except with sworn proofof incest, bigamy, abuse,denied the right to property,even what they came with ... why notmake a glittering beauty outof roaches, horseflies, and beetles?

And what's the metaphor in this,this anatomically correct4 × 6-foot papier mâchébas-relief of a Japanesebeetle made of beetles?

Each individual is ovalshaped, 3/8ths inch long,one-quarter wide, and has six legs.500 corpses tweezered intoplace with glue, their metallicbacks—think armor in Iraq—dulled by the killer liquid. Fourlayers of shellac will easily—a piece of cake, a slam dunk—restore their copper lustre.

The way they came, infiltrating,hitchhiking here, arriving inNew Jersey in box loads of freightfrom the Land of the Rising Sun,the way we let them spread....

The way we let them sucker us—think yellow cake, WMD—watching their emergence fromwhite grub to wings, we might as wellhave handed them the Bill of Rightsto shred. They made it down to NorthCarolina, 1932,then farther south and west and north.Now they're up to Saskatoon.

I harvest them from leaves reducedto lace, leaving the veins behind,flicked off in the early cool of the daywhile they're still groggy, to drownin soapy water. Sometimes they're lockedin postures of copulation—thinkEnron, Abu Ghraib—and falleasily to their deaths, sometimesthey're wary and sweep away with a buzz.

It seems the more there arethe more there are to catch and killyes, kill since we're on amber alert.Remember? We are a nation thatdoes not torture. We weren't warnedthe levees might be topped.There's pleasure in it, making artof the garden's most voracious pest.

Cuba, My Brother, the Hangings

I

The morning the triple suicidesare trumpeted, I wake from a wilddream of my brother the football star,a sybarite with his mouth-wet cigarsand the pretty whores of his Florida-Cuba weekend runs. It's old Havanain the seamy days of Batista: bright sun,bad blood, the screech of tires, no oneto blame, no one to know.In the distance, Guantanamo.

Into the rich gambling gravy stirredby Cuba's Capones imported fromNew York, Las Vegas, and Reno, comesmy brother the All-American guard.In the Sans Souci he pulls the slots,in the Nacionale he rolls the dice.The deep crimson walls, the Turkey carpetsevoke the fifties, the rum-flushed lipsof my brother, his still-boyish face,fingers stacking his winning chips.

II

My brother observes when these three manageto loop their bedsheets over the cageand place their heads inside the slipknotsand jump from the lips of the toilets—I am imagining this detail, asthe actual methodology hasnot appeared in the Times— their act at Gitmo becomesmanipulative self-injurious behavior,an act of asymmetrical warfare.In uniform now, my...