Present Tense, and: Toxic Sun, Fifth of July, and: Angry at God
Rent from DeepDyve- Present Tense, and: Toxic Sun, Fifth of July, and: Angry at God
Present Tense
1.The guy who plays the groundhog Punxsutawney Phil has gotten falling-down drunk. Six more years of darkness, he keeps shouting at the crowd. No one pays him any mind. No one else appears to notice. He almost trips off the edge of the float, and the float keeps going.
2.The healing units keep you from dying. On the floor, a worm cut off in a gutter. Who would feel sorry for something that looks like a sandbag ripped at the seams? A kick, a question. A kick, a question. A pile of prisoners stacked like sandbags prays to God. The cameras roll but no video is made.
3.It is 1682, a backwater year in the grand parade, before the Chinese emperor invades the island of Taiwan. A frustrated young artist paints a yellow square, then a band of blue above it, then a band of green below, then throws away the canvas in disgust. The Ottoman Empire on the move. In a few more months, their crack troops of Janissaries storm the gates of Vienna.
Toxic Sun, Fifth of July
The tide is red with the casings of spent firecrackers. Cans and bottles line the beach. Someone emerges to thread through the rubble, bleary-eyed [End Page 90] and hungover. A treasure hunter, sweeping the ground for change. Abandoned bits of clothing where the wounded would have been. Where kids ran everywhere, and bicycles and joggers jostled, are swarms of horseflies beginning to stir. Bits of yellow CAUTION tape someone tied around a stand of oaks to mark the turf his family claimed, complete with eating tent, a set of triple grills, and a generator: big daddy, beer in hand. They flutter in the breeze like a line of converts to an Eastern cult. On the boardwalk, two people, old enough to have been married fifty years, walk together arm in arm, surrounded by the timeless blue. But look at those ones there: hatred, hubris, and entitlement, our fleurs du mal.
Angry at God
Time has stopped. And yet, I can still think this sentence. I can turn to my friend. Long shadows lie across the hillside from the trees around us. No birds anywhere, no insects.
I thought you were dead, I tell him. Why didn't you call.
He looks surprised. Lifts his hands up to his face as if he's never seen two human hands before. Your friend died years ago, he tells me. Cut it out.
What do you want, I say.
What do you want, it replies. Perhaps I can help. [End Page 91]
Alpay Ulku's work has appeared recently in the American Poetry Review, AGNI, Boulevard, Field, and the Gettysburg Review, among others. His first collection, Meteorology (BOA), was selected as a "Notable Debut" by the Academy of American Poets Book Club. His manuscript "The Stiller of Atoms" has twice been a finalist in the National Poetry Series Open Competition.
