Ally Malinenko- Two Poems

American Pastime

I will be out of this country for just two weeks.

14 days.

336 hours.

During that time

a car will be driven into a day care center.

A 4 year old girl will die.

14 people were be injured.

In Texas, there will be another shooting in Ft. Hood.

4 people will die.

16 will be hurt.

In Pittsburgh 24 people will be stabbed inside a school.

A place for learning.

All of this will be reported to me,

on the other side of the ocean

listening to people talk about

my fellow citizens

and their actions

like talking about a tribe they don’t understand.

When I come back

the only music store left in NYC,

a cultural institution for 75 years will be shuttered.

I will hear about an art supply store closing

as well as yet another bookstore.

No music.

No paint.

No books.

I will wonder if in its place

gun stores will spring up.

Why not? That is our new national pastime.

We have no artists,

only killers.

I will watch this country

like a woman watches a deadly car crash

frozen

fearful

transfixed

but

hopefully

for my own safety

from behind

bullet-proof glass.

Emma Sings in Church

 

We take our seats in the church,

here for the noon day free concert

that they’ve been offering for 75 years.

It makes me wish the churches back home did this sort

of thing and then I remember that if they did

I wouldn’t be free at noon on a Tuesday anyway.

My weekdays belong to someone else.

I fidget, squirming in my seat

like a child,

behind me the pipes of the organ shine.

When the musicians come in I start.

They are all so young,

long hair and nervous smiles.

You can see the energy wafting off of them.

I look around the packed church,

my husband and I are the youngest people here

but we are not young,

not like these girls

who tuck their violins under their chin

fingers quivering with so

much potential.

When the soloist comes out,

her voice otherworldly

exactly the way Handel would have wanted

I feel something shift in me,

and for a moment I wonder if I will make it home

or if my plane will fall out of the sky.

I look at the program.

Her name is Emma,

this small girl full of so much sound

that I can feel myself breathe it in.

It tastes like buttermint and time.

It tastes like all that life

still ahead of her

begging to be filled.

For a moment I remember what that felt like

and then I close my eyes

and beg it to stop.

Ally Malinenko is the author of the poetry collection The Wanting Bone (Six Gallery Press), the children's book Lizzy Speare and the Cursed Tomb (Antenna Books) and This Is Sarah (Bookfish Books). She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the poet and novelist John Grochalski.