Utopia Minus

Susan Briante

A sample poem from the book

Big Theory

A red woodpecker scales the live oak, while I sleep,
the phone rings             makes its erasures:
          a demolition/construction
          a dream in which I'm revising a list with my father—gone
the way of whole neighborhoods in the Bronx.

Robert Moses shrugs his concrete shoulders
Robert Moses, I say, drop the knife.

In the summer of 2001, I lived in the Bowery, took photographs
of police call boxes,

took the train through Newark, NJ: warehouse, community college, broadface
of the projects irregardless of choices. I was a lonely child, loved looking
at things no one would notice: Rahway, Linden, Elizabeth: the many-eyed,
bricked-up, gold-domed, on the platform waiting.

So far as we feel sympathy, we are not accomplices.

Thick rain     and tree roots knuckle the sidewalk.
          In Newark, NJ, the sidewalks were slate gray, dark as thunderheads
big bang          big theory          of charge/discharge.

As a child, I thought I could save my mother's life by stepping in front of her.