Adam Henry Carrière

Giving Thanks in the Land of Roses

 

 

We lost the road to the village,

we lost the will, the words,

the language of a common dance.

     James Ragan, The Separation

 

Giving Thanks

 

Every light in the house blazed, but the small

Thanksgiving mêlée remained ill-lit.

 

Dry and tepid turkey, bad inconsequential football,

poorly strained cabbage, mis-mashed potatoes,

politely ignored lima beans, store-bought dessert:

 

Married America insists its legions feast.

 

With wintry streets dreamlike

in their empty breath, they lead

to the careworn scenery of grandparents,

the more human alternative of driving

into a wall lost in the disassociated

but well-rehearsed lines

delivered like Dresden’s fires.

 

The unlit trenches between the car seats

glowed of a cozy, less sinister land of Roses

the babies only knew from accusations –

 

dressed in wistful reminisces, strewn across the bleached

and subdivided, rural yet painfully still too near landscape

 

- that shone across the rictus of their teeth.

 

 

Matrimony Side

 

East and West Berlin sat

opposite ends of the meal

misbegotten children holding silent

dialogue with their rations.

 

November rattled in the background,

 

behind the old glass and obsolete radiators

the once-fashionable slum upheld against the city block

that dwindled with each dry-mouthed bite.

 

An untrue history book’s once brave officer

            in business to find an income

            he no longer had to lie to his kin about;

A daughter of an old-fashioned village of mothers

            checking pulses, shuffling papers,

            sticking needles into indigent asses.

 

Daily Blue Plate Specials

gunshot wounds

free refills

diseases of the poor

 

Both carried wallet photos of the increasingly mute

            Christian names elapsing from their communal flock,

both equally spited in absentia during school hours,

            neither forgiven in the perpetual theater of broken bread.

 

 

In the Old Country They Were Called Peasants

 

Yes, James, the neighborhood had changed. 

 

Our tribes, outcast in other folklore,

hadn’t learned to spell ‘sociological’ or hear

urban migratory patterns fly south, and out.

 

It takes an academy to misspell the anguish

of families running their course, ancestors

disappearing from their ankles up,

parkways and boulevards faded out

in an autumn bloom everyone took

to be safe and sound.

 

Closely-dreamt of trains passed less often,

the mills’ steady hum suddenly well-mannered.

 

The lower-middle

don’t situate geography like that,

convinced, all the roses were theirs.

 

Unionized sweat planted them.

Tears hidden in tavern beer watered them.

Hands toiled to corn held them

in tight bunches, the thorns a source of perverse

pride, bloodying a parish made of thick fingers.

 

Such roses could never be someone else's.

The riots were only news footage, the flights

the unsightly fright from unworthy coops,

they swore, the neighborhood could never change.

 

 

Zeitgeist

 

Those were the Archie Bunker days, daddy-o.

John played mind games, Paul grew wings;

The old Saint was the new Bond. Duke was out,

Shaft and Super Fly were in. Our White Sox wore red,

hired hit men, wore shorts, demolished disco records,

went broke and got bought out by the Bonzo crowd.

 

 

The Daze of Obligation

 

Churches, armies of aunts thought they’d built

hung ‘unwelcome’ signs from the ivory smiles

of the newly congregated.

 

Baptism was all that funky music,

at the expense of St. Anthony.

 

Hatefully, no one carried spare change.

 

 

Real Estate

 

a)

 

Frame houses passed down through big families?

            Repos before close.

Bungalows Truman built?

            Wrecks in a year.

Six-flats flowering the Drive?

            Tenements by Christmas.

 

b)

 

The flower beds in the park,

once untouchable, now undone;

the outdoor pool,

hollowed, barricaded;

 

even the stone fountains

(fluoridated water one good thumb away)

passed on.

 

c)

 

The ceaseless hiss closed

the toy store at Easy-Bake & Matchbox,

the candy store on 115th & Cherry Phosphate.

 

d)

 

The City banned FOR SALE signs

to keep the flight from panic.

 

It didn’t work.

 

 

Stardust

 

The State Theater became a marquee for a church.

 

The Normal Theater spat at the clock

‘til torched soon after, during a matinee;

 

midnight blue and gunmetal gray curtains,

like our parents’ eyes, their deep drape,

their every movement a wedding, a birthday

party, and funeral procession rolled into one.

 

Such screens go dark with only deep suffering.

 

 

Ancestors

 

Children of another era, who don’t recognize

the sorrow baked into homemade bread,

wonder why, on this, of all days, a simple prayer

in Great-Grandma’s paprika burr makes them all sad.

 

Her old pruned fingertips see themselves,

the solitude of no longer needing to want;

her accent was already over and done,

her loaves’ recipe stuck in her memory.

 

The vexing tittle-tattle of the uninvited, cooling heels

on streets with a million home movies, meowing

about missing hub caps and hitting potholes of spite

every Christmas toy on the market couldn’t fill.

 

Their pictures still watched, every bite,

loitering up on the dusty hutch.

 

 

Salt and Pepper for Dessert

 

Someone would be chosen, someone would have to go,

once all the food and pantomime ran dry.

 

It was only a bag of garbage, but it needed to go

where the many scripted roles of loving met

abandoned truth.

 

Touching rust and frost in the garden,

the alley still in their arms, an old man

hobbled through the chill, shaking his head

at the sight of a white boy crying over refuse.

 

He had seen the world from a set of rails,

always knew to look at both passages

for the right message, to sing while he prayed,

to dream he could still hope as bullets rained

across the fields he could still feel between his toes.

 

Yet those woolen sobs frightened him

where the old wars did not, seeing this youngster

taken in November’s heartless draught.

 

            The old man’s kin was down the block,

            up the hill, by the tracks, on the Avenue

            in the neighborhood this white boy was just visiting.

 

When the whimpers broke

mortified, on a woolen giggle, 

it seemed safe enough for the two of them to smile,

 

at two holiday meals distinct as petals

fallen from the same rose.

 

 

 

Adam Henry Carrière is an online habitué specializing in letters, publishing design, and instruction. A former NPR broadcaster, he holds a BA in Film & Video from Columbia College and an MA in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California. He has taught writing at both his alma mater and for the United States Navy across the Pacific. Born on the South Side of Chicago, Adam resides in Las Vegas, where he has won the Nevada Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry. He styles as Verleger / Herausgeber of Danse Macabre, Nevada’s first online literary magazine (which you may be familiar with) and DM du Jour, its daily gazette. He is the author of Miles (2013) Faschingslieder (2014) and Shant.