Arcadia
What I took to be a sweet little toad
With the kindest of smiles
Turned out to be my awkward yearbook photo
When I had not yet done anything wrong, really
What I took to be my yearbook photo
Turned out to be a ticket to a movie about a girl
Who indirectly causes a car crash, a dying
What I took to be a ticket
Turned out to be some kind of evil sprite
Who might fill your mouth with cement
And what I thought was merely a gap
In my memory turned out to be an impossible
Chasm into which my meager beauties disappeared
The baby I saw crawling across
The four-lane highway turned out to be a coyote
With a crooked leg while the loss of a friend
Turned out to be only the first chapter
A Small History of Fireworks
I vaguely remember screaming
at him as he ducked into his car and zoomed
off: I am not your automatic teller machine!
and though the rain was not quite rain, but darkness
and a sluice of night cars and cabs funneling
down the avenue and the firecracker on the next
block was a small one, mere pop and hiss, where upon
a small origami chicken inflated from the heat
and did some dancing, which turned out to be
a prelude to combustion, chicken into flames,
which I watched and wondered is this a dream?
and to this day I am not sure this type of firecracker
exists though I do know it was our nation’s birthday
and that little paper chicken danced/burned
near the lot where neighbors gathered
refuse, televisions, shopping carts, stuffed toys
that also looked like animals, old clothing served
as colorful banners, raggy by day, but that night
the trash was a tower with pennants snapping,
the wind was not quite wind but a disturbance
of vision due to all the smoke billowing up
the street in the dark, some faces were looking up,
marveling at the devilish explosions above,
others looked down and away as if nothing
was happening, what a shame, I vaguely
remember yelling, these thousands
of dollars are for what? YOU! this gunpowder
from China and these great supertankers
at sea past the Pacific island of plastic refuse
from the factories of indentured servitude
over the former oyster beds and duck habitats
to this city cut from the swamps and taken
by men, killed for and shamelessly diseased
and paved and I might have said all that
in Manhattan that night in the very location
where there used to be a stream which
now flowed beneath a basement somewhere—
a man who seduced me stuck my hand in it
one night but I know I staggered towards the park
towards a man who said I am the last gypsy
in Noo Yawk! That night I would ask him to swim
(Reader, I was drunk) with me in the river,
lets find the water, please, and he would say
gypsies don’t swim you cunt, but it was
an affectionate word coming from him,
on such a long night, with so much burning.
Bio:
Connie Voisine is the author of the recent book of poems, Calle Florista, from University of Chicago Press. Her previous book, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream, also published by University of Chicago Press, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Voisine teaches in the creative writing program at New Mexico State University and also coordinates La Sociedad para las Artes, its outreach organization. This year she lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland.