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      December 10, 2014Everything Is BrokenSharon Kessler

      Seems like every time you turn around,
      something else just hit the ground.
      —Bob Dylan, “Everything Is Broken”

      I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
      —William Stafford

      The dvd/cd/cvd/mp player: eject mechanism stuck.
      The wily master practicing his martial art
      is caught in the eternal
      teeth of the machine.
       
      My son’s computer: modem driver
      erased itself. Soldiers immobilized in the heat
      of battle. The escape velocity
      of glass:
       
      When I slammed the window,
      the old pane,
      in its rot-bitten wood frame,
      splintered. (Not
       
      the screen, though. That
      disintegrated months ago.) The couch, too, unfolded,
      its sprocket sprung, its hinge
      unhung, unrefoldable. Everything
       
      is broken, I complained, and my husband smirked,
      eyeing that couch-gone-to-bed, and giving me
      the lewdest look. The broken things
      of the world
       
      have never moved him. I’m the one who collected
      the kitten with the punctured lung
      from where it lay in the matted leaves: the mother
      licked it once and walked away. Nothing
       
      I can do, the vet said. What’s broken
      is broken. Only last week
      my daughter was watching
      Men in Black
       
      on the video when
      suddenly the two
      towering icons,
      lofty and self-evident,
       
      rose up on the screen. Sitting on a bench
      in Battery Park, the actors
      took no special notice
      of what was no more
       
      than conversation’s backdrop. Did you see that? I yelled,
      and my daughter rewound the tape. We watched it
      over and over, not as they had us do
      on CNN. Everything that was broken
       
      we made whole again. I told my daughter, This is a form
      of resistance. While the newsreel
      is stuck in its groove, our fata morganas
      shimmer.
       
      My daughter gathers broken children
      like dolls: their apathy
      frightens me, but she jumps right in
      to their broken hearts and tinkers
       
      until all their complicated machinery
      kicks in. But the motor
      on the Hoover’s
      gone again. The vacuum, or
       
      the broken edge of it. Superimposed on a map:
      Master Time Line. Revision #15.
      Entry Interface to Coastal Crossing.
      Approaching the Coast. Crossing
       
      the California Coast. Mach 18. Crossing Nevada.
      Crossing Utah. Crossing New Mexico.
      Remote Sensors
      Indicate
       
      Off-Nominal External Event. Momentary Brightening
      of Plasma Trail. Crossing North Texas.
      Last Pulse
      Before Loss of Signal. Last
       
      Recognizable Downlist Frame. The antenna
      snapped off in the car wash so I took my son
      to the seashore. Twenty video tapes
      survived the crash, as did hundreds
       
      of lab worms from a science experiment. One tape shows our hero
      floating weightless above the smooth curve of this coastline.
      My son is too old for tears
      so I cry for him.
       
      He sits on the sand at Caesarea, hot and unhappy,
      while I lie down in the water
      and let the waves break over me
      again and again. Maybe it’s because
       
      I haven’t told him yet, about those
      who are lost in sorrow or broken, the way
      their shadows draw up darkness
      from the sea,
       
      that even when we absent ourselves from
      the burning hourglass or webs of salt, that
      even when grief unfurls
      with a snap of the cord,
       
      whether we stare it down or look away, we are all
      travelers on Earth’s dark craft,
      husks of speed in the night.
      Flaming wings.

      from #44 - Summer 2014

      Sharon Kessler

      “I published my first poem in the 2nd grade, in the P.S. 207 newsletter, but then considered other callings: cryptographer, Mossad spy, chemist, and astronaut. Most of these required math, for which I had scant talent. I hid Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind inside my 11th grade math book. Poetry was like walking on the moon or breaking a code or having a secret identity or discovering a new element. I began writing it with a passion. I eventually moved to Israel and married a mathematician, with whom I coauthored three children. I was happy enough as a poet until, during a writer’s residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute, I accidentally stumbled upon a museum exhibit of old printing presses. Amazed by them, I spent the next few years learning to set type and print chapbooks on an antique press, scavenge old equipment, and smuggle related paraphernalia, unavailable in my adopted country, through TSA checkpoints. In my poem published here, the text in the ‘Time Line, Revision #15’ is taken verbatim from a map published in the investigation of the tragic crash of the Columbia space shuttle.”

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