by Ronald J. Pelias

My sister said on the witness stand
her child was just under bad influences;
she didn’t think irreparable damage
had been done; she still loved him.

That fourteen year old child she loves
tried to kill her. After his father went
to jail for cutting her throat, he tried
to finish the job. Wanted to shoot her.

Smug, just like his Father, he sat in that
courtroom, giving her the evil eye.
She would smile and he would look
away as if my sister did him wrong.

It’s hard to tell your sister her child
is no good. I’ve tried. But she insists
that everyone has an angel in them.
They just need to find their white cloud.

That boy has been a bad storm since
he was born. She never sees a thing
or her seeing is with eyes I don’t have.
Lightning lights the night for blind love.

She can’t cover that scar around her neck
with her cross, can’t let that evil boy
do her more harm in the name of Christ,
can’t live in the eye of God’s tornado.

by Michael Biehl

Every time the world ends,
he breaks out in loneliness,
like chickenpox. Then the world–wheel,
creaking, turns again, not like clockwork,
more like guesswork —
and the latest pockmarks commence
to melt.
Last night he heard a beaver
slap the river
with its rich, old tail.
But that might have been one of his rich, old dreams.
No matter. A dream is real
when it has to be.

by Michael Biehl

Death watches from an upstairs window
the little scene transpiring below:
six semi–dangerous
eighth graders,
jostling a fine elderly man with a cane,
ebony with an old gold handle.
Once upon a time his name was Michelangelo,
shortened to Angel by his mother,
foreshortened to Mick by his friends.
Once he was tall and o so elegant,
now he’s bent and spent,
a figment, a fragment,
yet tenacious as a ligament.
Death will have two of the girls for dinner
before setting a place for him.
The girls’ mammaries have already begun to inflate,
four of the six have started to masturbate.
Within two years
the group’ll be sashaying down Avenue Q,
a thuggish unit to raid offbeat boutiques —
and mermaid–like plashing in toxic rivers of sex.
The census takers have carefully counted and recounted
five thousand eyes on just one glass tower.
Yes, the girls are seen. Seen, seen, seen.
Never and nowhere has the world seen so much money
as in this unegalitarian megalopolis.
“Money’s also a kind of poetry,” says Wallace Stevens.
Semi–illiterate, ravenously vulgar,
the girls would have fitted in well
among the underbelly of Renaissance Rome,
among the cartloads of trash fish
hauled in and cast aside:
under the watchful eyes of the gorgeous domes, villas,
the Raphael–painted palaces and revolving thrones
of all that rotting mounting sublimity.

by Michael Biehl

God bless cookie–cutter houses,
cookie–cutter poems, cookie–cutter people.
Pigeons! Pizzas!
Penelope gazes about, and licks her chops.
One hundred and one stores, all mass–minded,
even Vuitton —
the staged lighting,
the clerks’ sitcom happiness,
the supportive, soporific music . . .
Penelope gazes and muses,
her eternal soul grazes
on plants pretending to be plastic.
She has earrings
on her mind,
something gaudy, dangling, vulgar,
yet laser–like —
pink striped chartreuse.
She’s a sucker, one born every minute,
and loves it. Sucking the lollipop
of shopping, her soul
happily bobbing
like a toy boat on a baby sea.
She doesn’t blame her optimistic parents
for being surface, she blesses them for it,
this gargantuan gift
of superficiality:
which requires such intelligence, diligence, discipline
that it has all the elements of prayer:
prayer sufficient
unto the day.