Lisa Gill

IN THE ROOM NEXT TO ANNE SEXTON
for Maxine Kumin

Fourteen-year-old Bahia Bakari who clung for thirteen hours
to the wreckage of Airbus 310 in the waters off Comoros
is told in the hospital that her mother is in the next room.

Say "Uncle." Who can't confess revelation is tiring, compulsory
presence of urgency, the demand of truth for a hearing? Knowing
that 152 people are dead won't help a broken collarbone set,

nor will not knowing.
                                  Today, if you don't want to be dismissed
as confessional, a life without the privilege of sate must be lived
only in the next room to let readers enjoy the assorted presence

of narrators who have happy or bittersweet or appropriate anecdotes,
maybe also one or two renditions of optic nerve spared emotion,

even though the dead mother's brother's counsel is sound only

if there is a next room. Words ultimately gain the weight needed.
I covet, and hold fast to, each available lack of exigency in the sea.

* * *

DOLLY SHOTS BEFORE AND AFTER SACCO AND VANZETTI
for Lola Ridge
"Did you see what I did to those anarchist bastards the other day?"
- Judge Webster Thayer

A camera mounted on a wheeled platform is still
in 1914 silent
unlikely to catch the ways and means of night sweats
no talkies yet
only a handkerchief over the mouth
airborne idiom of pride
or shame
or TB
though a girl dumping a tattered doll into the ditch
makes the printing press by the 20's
might have made nitrate film
flammable
with a quick pan to a man
"falling" 14 stories from the New York Department
of Justice in 1920.

Forgive me really I want to spoon
sugar
into the holes of Lola Ridge's body
exhumed
as an apology she'd understand because today
and too often I cannot write
a political poem
though I also have done as girls do
practice early toying with the execution
of power knowing later
(or sooner) need
will necessitate empathy with the beaten
down or executed.

Even with the improperly eulogized
woman
who kept sickness under wraps while protesting
everything
she knew wrong coughing
blood is wrong is a red flag that wouldn't pass
through congress
as a concept of economic care for the disabled
until more than a decade after
the 1943 development of streptomycin
two years after she was already dead and still.

Lisa Gill is the author of five books of poetry. Her most recent collection, Caput Nili: How I Won the War And Lost My Taste for Oranges, recounts how Gill fought to get her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 2003 and includes poems, essays, MRI brain scans, plus art by Kris Mills. Gill is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, plus several other awards. She coordinates poetry segments for Church of Beethoven and serves as Artistic Director for Local Poets Guild in Albuquerque, NM.