Alan Catlin- Three Poems

Kelly Flores with Caspar the Ghost, Halloween,

HELP Shelter, South Bronx, NY 1993

after Mary Ellen Mark

In this impersonal place,

spare, undecorated like a

rent-by-the-hour, twenty

bucks an hour, clean sheets

and towels extra, maids always

at your service, room; the child

seems so small, smaller than

she actually is, perched on a

dresser table near the sound off

picture on, TV, dressed as a

clown,  a player in a children's opera,

punch 'n judy play, already a

displaced person lacking clear

direction, looking puzzled, lost,

listening to whispered secrets,

encoded advice from Casper the

Friendly Ghost, emissary from

another, more forgiving world.

Higher Than Kites, Higher Than the Moon

Faulkner would have recognized

these guys as next door neighbors

to the Snopes, refugees from a

field study on the cause, effect

and harm caused by rampant inbreeding,

people who went on family affairs in

a pickup that looked as if it had spent

the War Years, the Punic War Years,

buried in a pile of compost and mud,

flatbed rusting through to the main

frame, muffler long ago left along side

the hardened ruts of what passed for

main roads to Nowhere, a place where

they and their kind lived, carrying a

homemade coffin with them wherever

they went that carried the remains of

a significant other inside, extra

pre-cuts for what fell out over 'Shine

and roadkill feasts on holidays, home

comings and funerals, tipping over

out houses on the way home for fun,

higher than kites, higher than the moon. 

The Napier Family 1989

after Shelby Lee Adams

Their family portrait shows only

three of sixteen offspring, the boys

who survived into their twenties for

a family shoot, not bothering with

formalities like shirts, all the better

to show off their grotesque scars:

a belly so grotesquely disfigured,

it is difficult to imagine how it got

that way, a growth maybe removed

by anesthetized-with-alcohol home

surgery, cauterized with boiling water

or maybe through acts of violence

like the ones that removed so many of

their kin from the picture: the son shot

by the father, a daughter poisoned by

relatives, another son shot by a brother,

others by strangers, law enforcement

agents, all these local legends story

tellers dwell on, concentrating on

the more amusing aspects of their drunken

stunts: on the son who has his address

tattooed on his knuckles and hand so

the sheriffs will know whose people

he belongs to, where to drop him off

when the sentence is done or sooner,

if the verdict was death, the alcohol

black out permanent and the next binge

begun, though it is the son with a home-

styled haircut who thrusts his head into

the shot at the last moment that attracts

the most attention, a wicked smile on his

profiled face, a knife scar prominent

stretching all the way from his lip the length

of his jaw tells all that you will ever need

to know about the family lineage; the ones

gone and the few who remain.