by David Luntz
Governor Winthrop Reads Yeats
An election’s coming up—
it promises new miracles
for a country founded
on a dream.
Strip-malls stir the desolation
Daniel traced in lion’s blood at 3 a.m.
Motel ink stitches into flesh,
veins twitch, severed power lines,
slow the vain slouch
toward the blue caduceus,
sputtering at the end
of the hospice drive.
Across the way,
my neighbors smoke horses,
bent over primrose fences,
still hunting ghosts
that dreamed
of a City on a Hill,
to know
where the
New World really lies
below substation hum.
Babel Tower
I moved to Paris to study German.
My teacher was from Namibia.
I learned pieces of Xhosa, Swahili—
Echoes of Dingane killing
His brother Shaka Zulu,
Abel’s ghost wandering a kraal.
I left my teacher. We’d been lovers.
Mornings, cappuccinos at a
Tunisian café overlooking the Seine.
The waitress—we never spoke.
Still, we became lovers.
Her passport said Kuala Lumpur.
She studied African art.
When it rains, I blur her charcoal
sketches against the glass.
Chet Baker on the gramophone,
bouillabaisse simmering.
I like her absence.
The expectant taste of her return.
I fly kites at the beach; she drifts on the wind.
A shadow of an assegai blots my dreams.
Work forthcoming in or has appeared in Post Road, X-R-A-Y Lit, Hobart Pulp. Twitter: @luntz_david