We Are Stuck in October by D. Dina Friedman

(after John Ashbery: The Chateau Hardware)

It’s raining again, and the remnants of leaves

shellacked on the slippery stoop test

our dogged tenacity. A dead time.

Trees choke red while people laugh

and point, lingering, the way one does

at funerals, unable to leave the show-horse

body, its lips like plastic fruit.

Remember how Uncle M. would eat

those phony grapes to make us laugh?

When he lay there embalmed, I thought of him splayed

in the armchair, watching the Yankees deflate,

no longer Bronx bombers in the bombed out Bronx.

You said he wasn’t much different in death.

He never talked that much. Even

when we saw the Yankees, before

athletes took knees at the national anthem

to protest quick-triggered police, before

the fallen leaves were slick, and we had

to beware of our balance. Don’t trust the beauty

of changing colors. The days are shorter,

darker. This weather is kind of a jail.

Yesterday, I heard the geese exulting

escape, sirens of honks and truth,

as if they knew hurricanes, wildfires, rising

water. A car alarm bleated a clashing,

distant pitch. No one paid

attention to the warning. Like stadium cries

for hot dogs, beer, we blot them out:

too normal in these slippery, tilted times.

Originally published in Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press, 2019)

D. Dina Friedman has published widely in literary journals (including The Sun, Hawaii Pacific Review, Lilith, Negative Capability, Rhino, Emrys, Crab Orchard Review, Steam Ticket, Blue Stem, and Anderbo) and received two Pushcart Prize nominations. She is the author of one chapbook of poetry, Wolf in the Suitcase, (Finishing Line Press) and two YA novels, Escaping Into the Night (Simon and Schuster) and Playing Dad’s Song (Farrar Straus Giroux). Visit her website at http://www.ddinafriedman.com.