| NIGHT HYMN by R. Nikolas Macioci NIGHT HYMNA prostitute saunters back and forth under a streetlight, takes permission from the night to be there. She poses, walks a few steps, poses again. She is a beginner, barely able to smooth out her movements. A car pulls to a stop. She bends to its window. She makes a nothing-doing head motion, and the car drives away.Watching the street as if she were at the seashore looking for shells, she seems nervous as the devil in church, draws back against a brick building. She seems calmer when she steps from shadow, trimmed in a slant of light.Another car waves her over. She crosses to it, hears his words, and opens the door. He has black eyebrows that hood his eyes, a longish face, a blurred jawline that prevents him from being completely handsome. They drive to the reservoir and park. She’s not scared until his hand smothers her mouth. Her eyes freeze. He drags her into a stand of trees. The boning knife slices into her body like a bird through moonlight. For a long time, her ribcage bleeds the same song. He is a messenger delivering his package to the night.Pulling away from the parking lot, he heads back to the city, thinking of the future and of the day someone will die. THE LAWS OF EXCLUSIONI was reared on isolation, a child slender and dreaming of protection. I gave life to plastic soldiers and circus performers on the ledge of the Philco console radio. Even then I knew I couldn’t make it through days without imagination, so while listening to The Lone Ranger I changed the whereabouts of the figures to a circle of sun on a flowered carpet.Then one pre-teen Sunday afternoon when I thought I’d rot away from boredom following a mashed potato-roast beef-parents bickering routine, I left the house and walked a dozen blocks to the Russell theater, dropped myself into a seat, watched lights dim on the beginning of escape.Film clicked through the projector and made a world where a poet was born, a world where I slowly drifted away from a dysfunctional family and let words off the screen become my dialogue with make-believe and loneliness. BAD POEMSWhen I crumple a poem,, I crush moon, rain, the clock on my desk all of which have been dominant images at some point. I am only ridding myself of inept work. Some say, with an intake of breath, that I should never throw a poem away, but the bad ones mount up more than I can count on both hands. Rarely do I glow with a good one, and I gag from unskillful consonance, disassociate myself from amateur assonance. I don’t think it’s a joke to join a jousting group of poets. It might make my iambic jabber into something worthwhile. I’ve withered into writing about lonely women and worn-out relationships. When I wad up a poem, I widen my horizons for something new, but the challenge is how to write something new out of old words. I’m much more successful fashioning paper airplanes from a legal pad than I am at penning a poem. I’m wedged between a rock and a haiku, and for rhyme’s sake, don’t know what to do. Give me another beer, and I promise to preserve the damnest doggerel you ever deemed possible. THE DISCOURSE OF SEDUCTIONWhat touches you erotically is words. You need language bursting with innuendo, images that demonstrate desire, so take my words, and I’ll lead you into sexual completeness. I will change from clothes into verbal nakedness, make a poem in which we are locked in the same skin, every failure forgotten. I will shed misgivings and begin endless warmth with written syllables. My meanings will massage your meltdown, moisten the mystery between us. Sentences will satisfy, phrases flow into you like molten feathers. My words will guarantee you grab air with handsful of feeling and weep for wanting more utterances. We will dwell in a language limbo, lie together and listen to sounds that limn images lovers live. I will write and release you into repetitious rhythms you will remember in the politics of your body. LIGHTHOUSE AT MARBLEHEAD PENINSULA The white pyramidal, cone-shaped tower rises fifty feet above rocky shore. Sheets of sun glare off its limestone, lightning. Bright. Perspective, aims my camera upward. Light dazzles my eyes, washes out the viewfinder, but I shoot the picture anyway without seeing the red catwalk and roof. Stepping into shade, I note that I’ve snapped the picture I wanted. Visitors mill the picnic area near the lake, climb fifty feet to the parapet, and look down on me. I’m told by the man selling three-dollar tickets that at night the fresnel lens still flashes green every six seconds. He says the lighthouse has guided sailors away from shores since 1822, yet there are those who sank to their deaths, lungs bursting for oxygen.I walk a few yards to the lake, listen to water splash against rocks, and think about bones tucked into the deep, about young and old robbed of their lighthouse warning when waves wrapped foamy tips around the bow, collapsed masthead, and swallowed the hull. For them, the lighthouse winked its intermittent green light too late. About the Author:  R. Nikolas Macioci earned a PhD from The Ohio State University, and for thirty years taught for the Columbus City Schools. In addition to English, he taught Drama and developed a Writers Seminar for select students. OCTELA, the Ohio Council of Teachers of English, named Nik Macioci the best secondary English teacher in the state of Ohio. Nik is the author of two chapbooks: Cafes of Childhood and Greatest Hits, as well as four books: Why Dance, Necessary Windows, Cafes of Childhood (the original chatbook with additional poems), and Mother Goosed. Critics and judges called Cafes of Childhood a “beautifully harrowing account of child abuse,” but not “sentimental” or “self-pitying,” an “amazing book,” and “a single unified whole.” Cafes of Childhood was submitted for the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. In addition, more than two hundred of his poems have been published here and abroad in magazines and journals, including The SOCIETY OF CLASSICAL POETS Journal, Chiron, Clark Street Review, and Blue Unicorn. |
