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John L. Stanizzi

S-PLAN

Bacon Academy
Colchester, CT
October 31st, 2001

1.

Shortly after 9/11,
a boy who had been stealing pick-up trucks
from a local dealership
and hiding them in the woods
so he could sell them later,
decided to fashion a fake bomb
and place it on the loading dock
outside the cafeteria
on Halloween morning.

We, of course, were all still
emotionally threadbare
and sent into a frazzle.

The first order of the morning
was to stop the buses
before they got into the parking lot,
and not let the kids into the school.

As each top-heavy yellow clunker
pulled its plume of blue smoke into the drive,
we stopped it and tried to explain
what was going on,
without freaking out the vampires,
witches, monsters, and ghosts,
12 buses,
each filled with high school kids
all being something else for the day.

We sent the buses to the elementary school,
where all 800 ghouls
would hang out in the tiny gym
until the danger had passed.

Take a moment here to imagine that.

2.

I thought of my own youth—
different time, same fear—
the old days of “duck and cover,”
air raid horn baying at the spring sky,
and all of us either balled up under our desks,
or standing, boy girl boy girl
against the cool, cool
painted cinder block walls
in the shadowy hallways of St. Mary’s,
the perfume of lilacs
in the breeze that breathed there,

or before me, in England,
the shelters in underground tubes,
railway arches, subways,
and my Auntie Elsie,
staring in dread at the ceiling
in the shelter in her cellar.

And later,
after the Russians did their bomb,
and Yuri Gagarin swirled around in our sky,
General Foods and General Mills
sold dried war rations,
and the nuclear protection suit was a hot item.

Wall Streeters even claimed
that the bomb shelter business
would gross billions in the coming years,
if there were any.
And every day
the radio sizzled warnings
that a shoddy, homemade shelter
would get you broiled “to a crisp”
or squeezed “like grapefruit,”
as in American neighborhoods
people built “wine cellars,”
or else the contractors worked
under cover of night.

I cried into our couch
for 14 days straight in 1962,

and I didn’t even really know why
beyond the fact that all the adults
seemed quiet and scared,
and I understood the word annihilation,
and saw, over and over again,
the documentary where the house
gets blown away sideways
by a speeding cloud of nuclear winter.

But the bomb never fell,
even though everyone,
including me,
kept fear in their hearts,
and spent years
practicing for the end,

3.

and it’s the same now.

When the kids returned to school
later that morning,
we tried to resume a
typical Halloween
in a typical American high school,
the kids dressed to kill,
the sugar-high higher
because they were back on familiar ground.
But the party didn’t last long.

Soon a voice filled with urgency
squawked over the perpetual loudspeaker
that we needed to immediately
go into the “S-plan.”

Ignore all fire alarms and bells.

Students in the hallway
should run to the nearest classroom.

Teachers lock your classroom door.
Do not let ANYONE in.

If students ask to be let in,
do not let them in.
Direct them to the office.
Do not let them in.

Cover the windows
with the black paper
that you’ve put aside
for this occasion.

Huddle all your students
into the corner,
away from the windows and doors.

Do not use the school phone
or your cell phone.

Stay there until you receive instructions.

And we did. For two hours,
me and the bum,
the Ninja Turtle,
the Queen of Hearts,
fear in the eyes behind the masks,
fear in the tears of the ballerina.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

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Paul Siegell

06.25.00 – PHISH – ALLTEL PAVILION, NC

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

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Lee Sharkey

BERLIOZ

Now let us praise Hector Berlioz
who found himself one night composing
a symphony as he slept who woke
lucid remembering the entire
first movement in A minor he could
have sat down at his desk and begun
transcribing as during the first hours
after a great destruction we see
in detail each small thing that was lost
as after my house went up in flames
carrying with them all of my poems
I sat on a mattress on a cold
floor and began to reconstruct them
found I could remember all of them
if only the night were long enough
but Berlioz willed himself not to
pick up his pen his wife was ill if
he wrote the first notes he knew himself
too well for months nothing would exist
except poured silver he would not write
the articles that sustained them how
would he pay for her medicine how
would he buy food he willed himself not
to pick up the pen yet the next night
the symphony visited him once
more it called him to service it called
him to adoration it took all
his strength to lie back down until he
finally fell asleep and the spurned
muse left him just as I fell asleep
laying my head on my journal and
the poems I had not transcribed left me
with only my child and my mate and
the spring where I knelt and chopped through ice
to draw the blessing of water let
us praise Berlioz for his unsung
symphony of medicine and bread

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

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Prartho Sereno

ELECTRODOMESTICO

One day the iceman came no more.
Neither did the coalman with his telescopic chute.
Nor the junkman with his horse and cart,
his dust and sweat-streaked face.
Not even the milkman’s xylophone
of bottles could be heard jangling
through the magenta streets of dawn.

That day the wide-eyed band of women
in calico aprons, pockets bulging with
clothespins, were swept away to a buzzing
world where everything came with its own
complication of cord. But these women of faith
knew what to do. They dove in and took refuge
in Houdini’s secret, hiding a small brass key
in their mouths.

And they did what they’d always done,
took everyone in—the plug-in refrigerator
and washing machine, a menagerie of electric
can openers, ice-crushers, and coffee mills.
And the Edsel of home appliances:
the sit-down steam press that could snatch
a shirt from your hands, send it back
an origami waffle with melted buttons.

It was Fat Tuesday in the history of man’s
imagination, a festival of dazzling inventions,
each one out-doing the next. The bobby pin
bowed to the Spoolie, the Spoolie
to the electric roller. The wood-sided
station wagon sidled up, wired
with a radio and its very own garage.

And the suburbs—that great yawn of grass
with its pastel stutter of houses, all
stocked with friendly products: Hamburger
Helper, Aunt Jemima, a detergent
called Cheer, a dish soap named Joy.
Turquoise linoleum nests, feathered
with vim and verve where they delivered
us, girls who grew into flowers, ceding

ourselves to the wind. They watched
in dismay as we pulled up those tender
roots and headed out for the likes of India
or Back to the Land. They couldn’t understand
why we left our humming dowries behind—
plug-in frying pans, carving knives, and brooms.

But on our way out they drew near,
as mothers do, and slipped us the keys—
the small brass keys they’d kept all the while
in their mouths, but never used.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

Read by Tim

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Mather Schneider

BETWEEN US AND IT

I’m a white American and she’s Mexican
but we’re trying to make it work.
We’ve moved in together.
There’s a dumpster outside our bedroom window
15 feet away,
a cement block wall
between us and it,
a gray cement block wall that’s full of air
and means nothing.
The dumpster belongs to the other apartment building,
the last of the expensive white ones
before it turns Mexican.
At night me and my girlfriend
are frightened by people
throwing things into the dumpster.
The noises are sudden and vicious, like thunder
or war, as if they are so proud,
as if it was the surest thing in the world
to be throwing away a microwave at midnight.
Later in the night we hear the Mexicans
taking things out of the dumpsters
to fix and resell.
The nights are hot in the desert in the summer
and in our sweaty sleep
the blanket on the bed gets pushed
and mashed together
between us.
We call it “the border.”
Even on the hottest nights we can’t
toss it away.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

Read by Tim