Issue IV Archive

Richard Kenney

World Cup, Campo dei Fiori

July adjusts and settles again over the city
Like some immense, irritated boiled fowl.
Now the companionable ferocity

Of the Campo: umbrella;  Bruno in his cowl;
Beyond, swallows' shadows slashing ocher
Welts across palazzo walls. The waiter scowls,

Shims the barstool pedestal. Now the accursed soccer-
Ball rockets past the propped TV, past churchbells, cobbles,
Bad dreams, unbelieving stars, stares, scores.

The TV screen sucks out like a membrane,
A little rainbow spittle-bubble,
Toward the Campo’s single indrawn breath. Bruno

Slumps. Bronze on a ghost. Hell. Hiss.Teary
Howl swells to mass hysteria, for Italy is history.

 

Daphne Abducted

While the first book, Young Men Without Irony,
Had secured her career, the second and subsequent works
Lacked dash. Bicoastal marriage; the child with a runny
Nose; the underperforming 401 K—irk-
some, certainly—yet all these were as nothing,
Next to the nagging ache of homesickness
Suffusing space halfway to Rigel, the mothwing
Moon on her cheek, crescent sun a cirque
Of nucleons releasing from the tearduct
Of the lorn Arcturan vivisectionist
Bent close above, his forceps and retractor
All agleam. Her last thoughts were of sex—an anise
Scent of medicine—all unfamiliar, in
The way that everything had always been.

 

Appears in The One Strand River , Copyright 2008 Richard Kenney, published by Knopf.