Two New Poems by John Gallaher

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

The Trouble with the Way Things Are

We’re going to make a doll
and dress it like a clown. We’ll have it do things
like go to the grocery store
or watch old movies.

Let’s play a game
where you try to run away from me
and I have to close my eyes, we’ll say
and the doll will start running
toward us.

It’s election day,
and we all need uniforms.

Our dolls hate us for it.

I like it best
when it’s hard to imagine anything
but the outside temperature
covered in pixie dust, we tell them.

And their job is easy,
they just have to put their heads
in this lion’s mouth.

One of these days we’re going to kiss them
and then throw them from a train
as it crosses a gorge
with a little river far below.

Maybe they’ll have wings
they never told us about.

Regions More Imperfectly Known

A lifelike quality ensues out over the little box
of old coins. It’s always based on light and dark,
even when color is involved, passing into some other time
we think we might want to visit with a hypothetical cocktail
where we’re just as we are now
but with white hair. With that, the flag blew from the porch
and took a string of lights with it. The rows of mothers
started practicing shh as the babies sang for the hijacked games
the news tells us were never played back then.

We couldn’t tell if it was mostly topiary or something else
they were attempting,
with the specter of the industrial revolution rising from the fields
mumbling something distasteful
regarding race relations and the best use of children,
where they like all the expected things. And sometimes it does happen
just like in the movies. The big reveal,
with the fireworks down the street
as the cape is off the future again, and we step into it,
in wave-like Technicolor, and we’re the caught glimpse of how things will be
for a time just prior to some further time
of which we can’t conceive, surrounded by playing cards
and dominoes.

We should go outside and maybe pick some of this up,
or just hope for streamers. The lights are still on. They’d look pretty
under streamers, and we could stand above them
asking if these are different things now
or parts of one thing, maybe many parts and some still undiscovered
or otherwise parts of different things closely related
in proximity — by design or chance . . . We tried it as a diagram,
but the focus group lost their nerve
and never filled out the questionnaires. Now they can be seen
barking at the shrubs and burying pictures
of ex-presidents. Don’t bother them. They’ll not trouble
anyone. You can even join in
if you like. It’s important. We have to keep burying things
so someday they’ll know who we were.

John Gallaher is the author of Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies in Cauls (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001); The Little Book of Guesses, winner of the Levis Poetry Prize, from Four Way Books; and Map of the Folded World, from The University of Akron Press. He’s co-editor of The Laurel Review and GreenTower Press. Currently he’s working on a book of poems with G.C. Waldrep, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, forthcoming from BOA Editions.

You may contact the editor of The Poetry Section at [email protected].

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