Poems by Dorothy Barresi
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Campaign Noir, 2016
You know what they used to do with a guy like that in a place like this? They’d carry him out on a stretcher.” Trump, in response to a protestor at a rally in Las Vegas Tight taut teeth and lips a little wet, a little hunch at the shoulders’ spite and seam. Wet lips, jaw-rubbed, that’s swell— tight tense talk & leering merit of American man quick at the eye, a small mouthed man, mean to mean on, cracked & pricked, sure, sure, if that’s how you want it, twitch-lipped, attention please! A short-shocked man is getting stiffed on a dead plot packing heat, a bare-fisted havoc man coughing mid-century blood— more cemetery press than kiss, more war more guns more prick to take it neat. Wet lips, nervous tick, cold-clocked, cold cock, gut shot, a tightfisted faithless twitch of a white-heat man with a hit a hook a jab—no hunch. Pour him a stiff one, hand him his hat. Where’s this train heading? Seething and grief, brother. Madness, seething and grief. “Campaign Noir, 2016” appeared under the title “Election Noir” in my book What We Did While We Made More Guns, in the Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. It was subsequently reprinted in Portside. The Problem with Bribery By the time a handsome councilman was arrested in Los Angeles for honest services fraud, his grift was so smooth you’d swear he’d come by it honestly. His proficiency with a silk pocket square alone! A local altar boy who’d grown up poor, he achieved a heightened sense of sexual beguilement via private hops to Vegas and red envelopes of fat cash he stuffed under his wife’s bed at the beginning and end of each month. Do the math! He wasn’t a goon. Just needed to treat himself for all the hard work he’d done pricing-out local contractors and their crews— and by extension those crews’ families, not to mention all the Section-8 tenants dispatched for a dime— to favor billionaire high-rise cabals who know how to get luxury zoned using preening pols as their shills. At sentencing the former lover of the poor drew a 13-year bid. Spilled some angry contrition. Railed in a hapless fashion looking simultaneously bloated and hollow at the same moment his future began. Maybe the blue suit he wore wasn’t his? The problem with bribery is most of us can’t afford it. Now the councilman was only passably handsome. But his wife looked terrific crying. Lucky her! She’d flipped for the prosecution from the start. And isn’t Los Angeles taller now, city of faults and seams and seems and elegantly back-lit night fights for more steel, more glittering windows carving all of downtown into one hard, clean-lined building tech bro Millennials pay handsomely to live in. Temptation borrows love’s husky whisper- voice from the noir Forties, sets its torch song alight like an arsonist, over and over until almost everybody loses it: what’s my take? Maybe a state-of-the-art fitness club with private trainer, salt-water pool, two screening rooms, 24-hour guards (armed), ample parking, highly complimentary valets, and a dog-washing station for every rooftop garden promenade. |
Dorothy Barresi is the author of five books of poetry, most recently What We Did While We Made More Guns (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press). She received an American Book Award, The Barnard College New Women Poets Prize, and two Pushcart Prizes. She has recent or forthcoming poems in Zocalo Public Square, Conduit, Lake Effect, and two recent anthologies: Poetry Goes to the Movies, and In the Black, In the Red: Poems of Profit $ Loss. Her manuscript in progress, The Anthropocene, explores the Exide Technologies lead contamination disaster in southeast Los Angeles. She is a retired Professor of English and Creative Writing at California State University, Northridge.
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