Three Poems|Glen Armstrong
Requiem for Pandora
She invented the sentence fragment
and a new way of appearing humble.
Her friends would stop by
to coax her out of her funk.
They tethered their dogs to a motorcycle
parked in the shade.
Only one of her eyes was misshapen.
Overnight, the bricks would cool
too quickly and crack.
Her family helped when they could.
They planted cottonwood
to obscure the house.
This is her history book.
The pages glued together.
This is her pencil box.
Sharpened sticks.
No graphite.
The gods still get a kick
out of what we call
attractive nuisances.
Once in a great while her clients
list fish bones as property,
but no one can rightly own a fish.
She gets that feeling again in her gut
every time the magician reaches
into his hat.
One Thing Becomes Another
Her knee is a falcon,
trained to seek and destroy
as soon as she releases it
from its hood.
Like a sentient cheese
Danish,
I crave my own
continued existence,
clean and fat.
I neither understand
nor fully appreciate the way one
thing becomes another:
Danger becomes desire.
Her leg becomes a skyline,
civility,
a wing.
Good Neighbor #53
Neither the cop nor the robber suited me as a child, so I would play at being the escaped lion from
the zoo, the lighthouse keeper who had talked to a mermaid, the sales clerk who measures feet for
shoes . . . I never understood why games were limited to two teams. Neither the cowboy nor the
Indian suited me. I was the agent from the patent office with a giant book of fantastic, annotated
drawings.
The goal of the game is to touch someone or to avoid someone’s touch. There are safe zones and
beanbags. Marriage and laser tag play out in similar fashion.
My people were farmers. They watched too much television. Maybe the thrill of the chase has
been bred out of me. All time is quiet time. I sit with blank pages waiting for you to land and tell me
a story about your wings, your fins, your tail. You lean in to tell me a secret. Something was
stolen long ago and never returned.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
Bio:
Glen Armstrong holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst and teaches writing at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.
He edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters and has two current books of poems:
Invisible Histories and The New Vaudeville.
His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest,Conduit, and Cream City Review.
