Alan Bern
Medusa’s Automotive
1.
The smoke comes first,
then the fire; that’s the rule
before the urban legend
about a missing wooden
link in the fuel supply;
the too-tiny engine
that could not compete;
the lonely helix of the drive shaft,
unmatched as if a spinster for life.
My mother once said
it was so hot in the desert
as she was learning to drive
a manual, that when the coffee spilled
on her skin, she felt nothing
and just kept going, maybe
toward the airplane boneyard
and other wreckage wrought
by her father’s employment:
privileged but imperative
in a war fought not over
whose toys made a bigger boom
but whose were more righteous.
2.
If cars ran on water,
or wax; if I talked fast enough,
though no one knew just
what I was talking about,
I wouldn’t go to prison
or the booby hatch.
If Los Angeles kept
its electric railroad line,
I wouldn’t have to build my own
in the spare bedroom
with pins, rivets and clips
combed from the garbage;
or wait for the right neurons
to coalescence at the appropriate time;
or for stones to spark
with steel, so I could have identified
in advance the flaw
in the design.
3.
He might have let her keep it
if she weighed less, or the car weighed more;
he might not have been as envious
if his father had connections
like hers did, but that is the nature
of the immigrant experience,
the rungs inaccessible though
the frames are everywhere,
growing like trees the money
is harvested from. As recompense,
a sign of devotion to the family
then begetting in her belly,
he bought her a station wagon
that would fail in the same way
the banished-mobile was suspected
of being capable. The thing
about justice, or symmetry,
in dogfish, and bombers,
the faces of photogenic humans:
it doesn’t apply to metal
as it’s beaten into curves
and fenders, as stone might take
to a scalpel.
4.
It’s a complicated story,
as most true ones are,
told obliquely though
excavated whole, unlike
legends we live by, but still
the parts are more entertaining
than the whole. Yet the moral
is not applicable, too individual,
about repentance on a sliding scale,
not pay what you can but regret
what you will. Not the flesh
bruised twice without blood,
the marring of daughters,
or contaminating drip irrigation
with oil. The longest lasting grievance
she’d ever cop to was how he vetoed
that car, a lemon among its sisters
yet now preciously valuable
to collectors of that era.
In relief, a bit of humor
because she was a lady,
she had class; or perhaps,
in the end, like so many others,
she was exhausted and checked
the pragmatic box in pencil:
another waste of organic material.
Jane Rosenberg LaForge writes fiction, poetry, and occasional essays in New York. Her most recent book of poetry is Medusa’s Daughter from Animal Heart Press; her most recent novel is Sisterhood of the Infamous from New Meridian Arts Press. More poetry is forthcoming in Minyan, Sledgehammer Lit, and Pirene’s Fountain.
Alan Bern, retired children’s librarian, operates with artist/printer Robert Woods the illustrated poetry broadside press Lines & Faces, linesandfaces.com. Alan’s awards include first runner-up for poem “Boxae” in Raw Art Review’s first Mirabai Prize for Poetry, 2020, and a medal for a WWII story in 2019 from SouthWest Writers. Recent work: CERASUS, Slouching Beast Journal, Feral,and Mercurius. He is the author of No no the saddest (Fithian Press), Waterwalking in Berkeley (Fithian Press), and greater distance (Lines & Faces). Alan performs with dancer Lucinda Weaver as PACES: dance & poetry fit to the space and with musicians from Composing Together, composingtogether.org.