by Steve Luria Ablon

Use the telephone keypad.
Transmit your social security,
careful just the last four numbers.
Recall your address, your zip code,
your uncle’s niece’s married name.

Press 1
to pay your bill.
Press 2
to order new service.
Press 3
to make an appointment.
Press 4
to hear special offers.
Press 5
to hear the menu again.
Press 6
for more possibilities.
Press 7
to start over.
Press 8
for the polar icecap of technology.
Press 9
for self sufficiency, don’t ask for help.
Press 10
for Madagascar,
to talk to someone
with time on his hands.

by Steve Luria Ablon

Who wants to read first? Who will
take notes? A last name starting with

A is always first, always anxious,
always armed. So I never learn

to improvise, always on the line.
When we went to the park each day,

in kindergarten the teacher called on me
to cross Eighth Avenue, cars not even

slowing yet. In second grade I had to sit
in the front row under Miss Munson’s

blue hawk eyes, first to touch the turtle
in its bowl. Every sixth grade boy tried

to beat my hundred–yard dash.
By high school time never ran out

before I was called to translate
a passage from Balzac, “There is

no such thing as a great talent
without great will power.” It wasn’t

until sophomore year Tom Aaron
moved to New York from Guam.

By then I want to be first, to get it
done, to take the risk, set the standard?

Even in medical school I was called
to do the spinal tap while the others

watched, some sympathetic, most
hoped for the worst, pain and blood.

by Brian Evans-Jones

Sea City Museum: first return after emigration
          (Southampton, England)

She thinks our son’s first word
is “Mom”:
I think it’s “Mum,”
the long vowel not US–nasal but UK–prim.
We dispute it
as if it were Kashmir.

When we left our borders
we made a new thing: my DNA
pioneering in her strange country.
But to him I can’t call her “Mommy.”
Words are coastlines, edges,
for they all

cut something off,
and a nation is a language
with an army.
Petrol for gas, garden for yard,
pennies for cents: mine’s redcoated
and doomed.

So there are no words on the newsreel
where the peasant from Russia waves
the Stars and Stripes like mad
and with the other hand lifts high his baby —
they made it, she is going to be
a country, a language: he can’t speak.

by Brian Evans-Jones

No rain here — the clouds
thicken but keep
mum and if not quite
still then at least
demure. No rain
though the air’s charged
with water —
this morning’s fog
wet still on skin and clinging
into the soft
lining of
lungs.
         But at the falls
the river
rockets over
the dam: a long, loud
shout
of upstream
torrent, flood — printed
white onto
the black
dam wall. Thick
fast white, churned
with trouble — 24–hour
emergency broadcast,
layered, panicked,
tumbling over
itself.
         And in the rapids,
appalled whitefaced
water crowds —
pushing forward, fretting back,
turning
the big news
over and over.