John Mulrooney is a poet, filmmaker and musician living in Cambridge, MA. He is author of If You See Something, Say Something from the Anchorite Press and co-producer of the documentary ‘The Peacemaker’, from Central Square Films. He records and performs regularly with a number of groups in the greater Boston area. He is Associate Professor in the English Department at Bridgewater State University. His work has appeared in Fulcrum, Pressed Wafer fold’em zine, Solstice, The Battersea Review, Poetry Northeast, Spoke, Let the Bucket Down and others.
Watching the Detectives in Time of National Crisis – a Love Poem
When Omar Little gets killed
in the back of the, no, I’m not going to tell
I’m not going to tell you
in case you haven’t seen it.
And the reveal matters.
And so there is always a place
where the story starts
the waters arrived at where
the god declares she is a god
and you who are so good at
making something out of nothing
child of the general truths
at play in the fields
can tell me who the speaker of this poem is.
Newborns stumble out of the womb
already mourning the closing of Jersey Boys
all crying from homesickness.
The speaker of this poem was convinced
he was once filled with god’s breath
and that’s how he got addicted
to this breathing thing.
The country breaking in his chest
like a borrowed heart.
Satan, that old philanthropist
grins back from the TV screen
“Lenny Briscoe smiles and looks at the body”
says the augmentation for the
visually impaired.
the speaker of this poem –
her worries make a nest in her mouth,
the death of a loved one first imagined
the lines of their face
now suddenly the clutter
in an apartment being packed up for moving.
Whiskey’s best advice is to find
Venus in the night sky
and the speaker of this poem
is forever seeking that which is
not yet mortal.
Perhaps the poem is not a thing
but just a condition of things,
and Kanye West you see
is Hölderlin and Joey Bishop was
the red shirt of the rat pack
but that’s not who Jersey Boys
was about.
Detectives look for fingerprints
because they’re seeking fingers.
If I make this skull a lyre
will this light pluck the strings?
To truly love is to never speak
to honor with a poem is to trample
And this isn’t about you
but it is still to say I love you.
~
They Eat Fire
The flat Atlantic chalky in the sun.
New York, a cluttered interruption.
For a moment, you feel yourself a comet.
For a moment you feel falling,
as if this could not be by design.
Breath held, denied the rest of the cabin,
as if you might need it in some wet, darkness
that you will be plunged into panicking,
until the stiffened muscles of your buttocks
shiver into relaxation under the blunt
guidance of wheels on the runway.
And your mouth opens slight.
Lungs gulp the customs air,
and after making no declarations
your body settles in to the lounge chair
like you had arrived at Lourdes,
faithful, to drink their waters
of Bud Ice and bathe in their cathode rays.
“How do you top a year like that?”
asks the ad for a news program,
as if they had planned it all around their ratings;
revolution in June, earthquake in August,
elections tainted and war, war, war.
The bartender shuffles TV channels
like a deck of cards fanned out electronically.
A hurried traveler, laptop on barstool,
taps formica with a credit card,
causing the channel surf to touch ground
on nature programming.
An unbodied voice says that the early earth
was bombarded with meteors and asteroids,
accompanied by a computer generated image
of firey streaks falling over mountains.
They are researching volcano chimneys
on the ocean floor. In the coldest, darkest place on earth,
where previously it was thought there could be no life,
there are stacks of fire filled with organisms
that defy genus and phylum,
that defy the disciplines of science.
For so long they have survived.
They don’t swim but attach themselves
directly to the column, tunneling in,
rooted almost, and they seem to live on geology alone,
some nutrition there is in explosions.
Blind, cold, alive, they eat fire.
Channel switch bursts across screen.
Ted Koppel’s voice cuts in before
his shock of red hair comes into focus.
Going over the day’s bombings of Serbia,
and the strength of the Serbian resolve.
The night sky, a murky darkness
broken by the flash of bombs
seems subterranean, submerged.
The field interview – a man with a mouth
like a cemetery recounts though
tombstone teeth what makes his
brothers such great fighters:
They tunnel and wait, they hide and seek,
they dedicated. They eat fire.