You Asked For it

There was a show on TV called
You Asked For It. Viewers would write in
and ask to see unusual things, such as
the world’s greatest slingshot expert.
I watched it every week
on our humble Motorola, although
the only episode I can remember now
is the one about the slingshot expert.

He was a grown man, as I recall,
and he lived in an ordinary place like New Jersey.
At a distance of ten or twenty paces
he could pulverize one marble with another.
He could hit a silver dollar
tossed into the air. He was the kind
of father I wanted to have,
an expert shot, never missing.

And I think of him now, perhaps long dead,
or frail and gray, his gift forgotten.
Just another old guy on a park bench
in Fort Lauderdale, fretting about Medicare,
grateful for the sun on his back, his slingshot
useless in this new world.

George Bilgere

Tamanrasset

On account of my knees
I thought a camel would be appropriate:
I could be helped on
and eventually off again.
Have you ever
got on a camel?
They go down for you
on their own padded knees
and close their eyes while they wait
for you to be set in place,
like priests waiting for all the communicants
to be done, in some high church.
Then they rise, tipping you,
heaving beneath you
but you don’t fall,
you are suddenly
feet up in the air,
carried forward on the long sway
of their stride.
They will carry you across deserts,
across days and datelines
until you arrive one far-off day
in the city of Tamanrasset
where you have been waiting all your life
to go.

Rosalind Brackenbury

"There are no endings in life,
only beginnings."
She did not believe it.
Just yesterday her paycheque had ended,
the year before that her career had ended,
and five years before that,
her relationship with her sister had ended.
There was no pause or restart button,
there was no way to try again in parallel universe Z,
the universe where every moment was a perfect coincidence,
the kind where opportunities happen.
Everything was an ending,
this is gone,
this is gone,
you are gone.
One day older,
a hundred years have passed between then and now
and she has been reading the same sentence.
His face is still fresh in her mind.
She wonders about all the things that never began.