Poetry

Benjamin S. Grossberg is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Hartford.  He has published four books of poems including My Husband Would (University of Tampa, 2020), a Foreword Indies Book of the Year and winner of the 2021 Connecticut Book Award; and Sweet Core Orchard (University of Tampa, 2009), winner of the 2008 Tampa Review Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. His poems have appeared widely, including in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies, Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and the magazines Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Ploughshares, and The Sun.

Heaven

The Houston nightclub, long shut down, where
I once spent Friday nights.

Someone shoots up Heaven,
both bars and the small
dance floor in the back.
But the patrons, all just
my memories now,
ethereal, wisps of smoke
and soul, don’t notice
or care. The bullets
spray through them
where they cluster at
the second bar, blurring
their bodies as they flirt
and throw back cocktails
that turn to vapor
in their mouths.
Heaven’s dance floor
is a sway of boys. It’s still
early nineties here,
so pastel disco lights flash
to “Strike it Up” and “100%
Pure Love.” Patrons dance
as only memories can,
pressing so close they pass
through each other
at the lips. When bullets glide
through them, their bodies
mingle at the entrance wounds.
Fridays, cover charge
is a canned good, a donation
for the local soup kitchen,
and booze, a pour of smoke
in a plastic cup, costs only
twenty-five cents till eleven.
On a night like this, sultry, with
boys lined up to enter, a can
of Kroger peas or hominy
in hand, the click
click click of an empty
magazine, his last, is lost
to disco. He throws down
the gun, its cold solidity,
and charges the crowd.
But the boys turn to mist
still laughing at their own jokes
and settle once he’s passed.
Spent, he collapses unnoticed
against and through
one of Heaven’s walls,
and tumbles right out of it.
At the bar, one of the boys
drifts toward another
a few stools down, the swirl
of him blown back
by the movement.
All night, he’s been watching
a guy—Michael—who he
will continue to love
long after they’ve parted ways.
He’s just found courage
to go up and say hello.

My Daughter Would

Eat McDonalds. Hate cats and refuse to pretend otherwise,
even with my cat who she’d call “butt stain” and flick off
the couch with her thumb and forefinger. Be named
after Viola from Twelfth Night because I was delighted by

Bonham Carter in the Trevor Nunn film. Her friends
would call her Lola because she’d have somehow discovered
The Kinks. Would she know I hate that song? My first
boyfriend said Don’t bury me when I observed we’d never

grow old together because of his HIV status. She’d have
dug his Wassily chairs—black leather strips over chrome
which looked like torture devices or sex apparatus.
He insisted they were comfortable. She’d have

plopped herself down in one and stretched her arms
along the armrests, asking, Where are you taking me for dinner?
It would only have seemed like they were ganging up on me.
I’d have bought her books, a bicycle, skirts the color of

forest moss in rain, to match our eyes. A watch pendant—
1920s reproduction decorated with seed pearl.
She’d have wiped wrenches with the crenelated skirts,
rolled her eyes and never worn the watch, but kept it

with the diamond studs in the locked drawer of her desk
until she sold both to buy an old Prius, to visit Tijuana
after graduation. I’d know because I’d have kept a key
to the drawer, which I still wouldn’t have told her about

even now, though she’d be a parent herself and doing
similar things. He once told me, my first boyfriend,
that the only loss he felt when he was diagnosed
was that he couldn’t have kids. He and I spoke

that intimately in bed, which I’m not sure people
do anymore. That’s the thing you’ll miss? I thought,
incredulous. He curled his head on my shoulder,
and I said I hoped he’d miss nothing. Viola, lower that shit

music and shut your goddamn door. My own parents use
expletives compulsively—they’re from New Jersey—
and did so throughout my childhood. One Seder, my brother
printed a picture of a woman fondling a gray stallion

and brought it to the table, where it rested on his Haggadah
until it caught my father’s eye. My mother was serving
gefilte fish, a tan, pocked loaf in translucent mucous.
With current drugs, even if he and the mother were both

positive, he could—the baby would be protected. These days,
when I bring Viola home for Passover, it’s disappointingly
sedate, but I’m unnerved anyway when she pokes
the gefilte fish with her finger, puts the finger to her mouth,

then eases a slice of the cold loaf onto her plate.
Since my mother and brother are eating it, too, I can say
nothing. Through the magic of Facebook, I know
he, at least, has found a husband. They recently redid

their kitchen in sleek checker-board marble. Shut
your own goddamn door, Dad, she screams from upstairs.
And it’s Lola, okay? LOLA. Their stainless fridge
has no drawings taped to it, just like mine.

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Born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, Keith Kopka spent many years playing in and touring with punk and hardcore bands all over the country. His poetry and criticism have recently appeared in Best New Poets, Mid-American Review, New Ohio Review, Berfrois, Ninth Letter, The International Journal of The Book, and many others. Formerly the Managing Director of the creative writing program at Florida State University, he is also the author of the critical text, Asking a Shadow to Dance: An Introduction to the Practice of Poetry (Great River Learning, 2018), and the recipient of the International Award for Excellence from the Books, Publishing, & Libraries Research Network. Kopka is a Senior Editor at Narrative Magazine, the Director of Operations for Writers Resist, and an Assistant Professor at Holy Family University in Philadelphia. The following are two poems from his collection Count Four.,  available from the University of Tampa Press:

Ancient Astronaut Theory

My friends’ marriages are failing
in their collective prophecy of a future
where people in love beat the natural
universal order. But isn’t it possible,
asks the omniscient voiceover,
and I’m thinking, sure,
the pyramids were built by aliens,
Adam and Eve were celestial
beings, and all of us are just
stones paving the road to a Mayan
apocalypse. My friend Don believes
he’s good at scratch tickets. I’ve
seen him scrape a whole stick figure
family off the back windshield of a
minivan. We are not alone, the voice-
over says, and the debris left by all
the weddings on Earth forms a comet
of hors d’oeuvres and cocktail
napkins barreling through the
coat check room of our singular
universe. Don declares he’s never
getting married. He’s going to ride
his scratch-off skills all the way
to the state Powerball, buy an RV,
and find the alien settlement of
Branson. I don’t believe he’ll find it,
so its existence doesn’t matter. This
is the circular logic that ignores
your spouse deadbolting the door
when you go out to investigate
the light in the backyard.

The Birds of Montreal

I reach across the brunette,
pull a napkin from the glove box
so she can blot her lips. I’ve been
in love with her since we hit
border traffic, the way she smiled
at the Mountie when he asked
why we’re visiting. She’s a painter,
her husband is a musician, and
they argue in French at the table
like I’m not there. We’re eating
poutine in a courtyard canopied
by hackberry trees. At sunset
Montreal looks like the big brick
fireplace I had in Massachusetts,
where one afternoon a tanager
glided down the open flue
and careened around the room
until it broke its neck against
the ceiling. The brunette doesn’t
touch her meal, but scoops her
hair behind her ear each time
it blows forward. The breeze
comes off the Fleuve Saint-Laurent,
the husband says in his meticulous
accent, before he pays the bill
for everyone. After dinner, we go
to a church basement to watch
him play experimental noise
for a crowd of ten hip shadows,
through a machine that makes
him look like a telephone
operator, while the brunette
and I stand in the corner, close
enough that our shoes touch.
His drone ricochets against
the ceiling and lodges in the base
of my neck. The brunette isn’t
paying attention. The show
is a success. We celebrate
at a bar lined in ostrich heads
that peer down at us as if
we’re underground. We drink
absinthe, and the husband talks
about the kids who stole a bird
from the wall, how no one ever
caught them, how he imagines
that head in the basement of a frat
with bras and panties looped
around its neck. I nod
to stop from asking him what it is
to be flightless. A waiter lights
my sugar cube. The husband toasts
me, and I tap my glass to his,
stare at the blank in the row
of ostriches. Under the table,
the brunette unfolds a napkin
on my lap, her palm holding me
through the cloth makes a slow,
migratory circuit.

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