by Gerard Malanga

       She could’ve been famous in her time or in some future time, had someone
taken notice, mentored her, paid homage.
But I remember reading somewhere
how we create our own destinies,
how photographs likewise seal our fates. So she’s nowhere
to be found, fated as it were.
                                                 Perhaps some quiet backwater
or in the bowels of Brooklyn or Manhattan.
The whereabouts of where, the plains of Kansas, the echoing Midwest. For all her 15 years
Time stopped, a guessing game
no older than when I remembered her and don’t remember her.
Her youth preserved.
A life lurking in the oblique shadows,
criss–crossing streets. Reflections in shop windows
unrecognizable. Memories gone haywire and gone blank.

by Gerard Malanga

       Elephants are the greatest dancers. George Balanchine
knew this. They make no claim to beauty
but overwhelm with nimble grace, their stoic silence,
till the song pours through. They have their way,
their to and fro, their sashay, their solemnity.
Those early afternoons where dreams set in. They close their eyes.
They are alert. They yearn for more. They are family.
They are venerable. The drifting breeze
drifts further still. More the yearning and the swerving.
Through a wilderness, a calm
they are in love waiting to return.

by Gerard Malanga

       Goodbye Galway
       as my sciatica is acting up, and you turn to laugh.
Constant reminders, headaches of so much left undone,
unsaid. So many aimless roads,
so many aimless thoughts commingled into one.
The screendoor slowly creaking shut.
The dusk descends, any dusk awaits a visit that will never come again. Those
meanderings, those skinny–dipping pools
where we’d swing free and take the plunge,
where for a second I’ve found you
in my reverie but nowhere
else. Where have you gone?
Where has the twilight dipped and swayed?
Who walks beside you in the languid air?

by Clayton Eshleman

                                           10:28 AM:
          top of the Tower: the antenna spire begins to descend
          before any movement occurs in the exterior walls
          (suggesting the Tower’s collapse begins with the
          destruction of what supports the antenna: the building’s
          fireproof core columns)

How could the debris crush 96 steel & concrete floors
while surging earthward at the speed of gravity?
Each floor shattered before the debris above it made contact
i.e., the debris never collided with any floors.

Most of the jet fuel was gone in the initial fire ball.
Black smoke = oxygen starved fires suffocating.
Jet fuel cannot melt steel or iron —
molten steel needs 2750°F to melt.

1,434 people murdered.

Over a hundred fell or jumped to their obliteration.

The first departure occurred 4 minutes after the first plane hit, from the 149^th
window of the 93^rd floor on the north face of the building. The “cascade” began
7 minutes later, with 13 falls in 2 minutes.

People hugging or holding hands as they fell together.

Did Eddie Torres jump?

Terminal velocity 120 MPH, up to 200 MPH if the person fell with
     the body straight.

Karen Juday identified by her husband in a photograph wearing the
familiar bandana she always put on at work, standing in a window frame, holding on, with flames behind her.
Edna Citron seen waving out from a deep gash in the North
Tower, smoke & flames behind her.

“I think most of the ‘jumpers’ actually lost their grip while gasping
for air and were eventually burned out of the building by all the searing smoke,
burning up their hands, burning up their backs.”

“It was raining bodies. They were jumping now, one, two, three,
four, smashing like eggs on the ground.”

Man in a white waiter’s jacket, black pants, black high–tops,
photographed by Richard Drew, frozen in a head–first dive, came to be known as
The Falling Man.

Norberto Hernandez?

Jonathan Briley?

“Little people falling like fairies.”

“Some tried parachuting until the force generated by the fall
ripped the drapes, the tablecloth, the desperately–gathered fabric, from their
hands.”

“They were like big ketchup stains with clothing on top.”

         *

21,300 windows
300,000 square feet of glass
100,000 tons of structured steel
2,500,000,000 square feet of gypsum
3 acres of marble
212,000 cubic feet of concrete become

horror dumps of pulverized debris,
molten metal flowing down into the rubble piles,
large salmon–yellow pools of molten metal in the post–collapse
     basement —
the end products of a radio–computer–initiated firing from Building 7
   using super–thermite matches?
Unspent aluminothermic explosives & matching residues
   were found in the Tower’s dust

         Karen Juday’s jawbone

along with Adolf Rumsfeld’s turned–off cell phone.