Tag: play

Meditation (Intermission) by Bonnie Naradzay

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Meditation (Intermission)

…what if the master of the show who engaged an actor
were to dismiss him from the stage? “But I have not spoken
my five acts, only three.” “What you say is true, but in life
three acts are the whole play.”

        — Marcus Aurelius

It’s all I think about these days, when intermission is,
will it ever come, has it passed, and how many scenes
are in this act that’s so interminable, if it’s not the last.
Could this be the whole play? Hamlet wanted more time.
The end seems hurried; everyone but Horatio falls dead
at the banquet, then Fortinbras appears. The play’s
the thing! Mother’s things are boxed up in a pre-fab shed
behind my sister’s place. Closets bulge with our belongings,
and what are they for? My father’s French wife got rid
of all he owned as soon as he died although I’d wanted
something to remember him by. She had him cremated;
then the VA sent his ashes east to Arlington Cemetery.
My sister wanted a ceremony right away to lay him
to rest behind a small locked door. I could not face it.

*

Bonnie Naradzay’s manuscript will be published this year by Slant Books. For years, she has led weekly poetry sessions at homeless shelters and a retirement community, all in Washington DC. Poems, three of which have been nominated for Pushcarts, have appeared in AGNI, New Letters, RHINO, Tampa Review, EPOCH, Dappled Things, and many other places. While at Harvard she was in Robert Lowell’s class on “The King James Bible as English Literature.” In 2010 she was awarded the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize – a month’s stay in Northern Italy – in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary. There, Bonnie had tea with Mary, hiked the Dolomites, and read drafts of Pound’s translations.
https://www.bonnienaradzay.com

How (Not) to Die by Abby E. Murray

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How (Not) to Die

She says that today, during recess,
they played dying. Basically, she says,
dying is when all the kids crowd

onto the slide until someone falls
over its side, and you cling to the edge
because the chipped rubber turf below

is death. A friend has to save you,
she says, and if they fail—if you’re lost
to the ground despite the hands

of your friend outstretched—you die.
But, she adds, if you die, you get
to come back as a ghost, climb

up the slide, and pull the socks off
your friend. In other words, you get
to haunt the one who tried hardest

to prevent your demise, take a little
of their warmth with you, leave them
less complete than they were, set

a fraction of their own body beyond
their understanding. And this strikes me
as unfair before it registers as accurate

too—so true, in fact, that it explains
survivor’s guilt in a way that makes
humans seem reasonable. Every ghost

will have its due. No one who lives
will remain completely whole. Friends,
who needs dreams or the cryptic ways

of the unconscious mind when there are
children on playgrounds, processing
what it is to exist in a world built

only by hands that cannot survive
or save it? When I tell my daughter
what I, a grownup, think is fair in life

and death, she looks at me with the same
pity any god might show me, as if to say
thinking has only ever gotten us so far.

*

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.