by Jonathan Harrington
A Simple Life
You close the screen door
of the motel room
behind you
and follow the sandy path
one last time to the beach.
The smell of salt
lingers in the air
and a cool breeze on your neck
takes your mind
off the long drive home.
The boardwalk is closed for the season
and the reflection
of the slumbering Ferris wheel
shimmers in the wet sand
at the water’s edge.
Beyond the breakers
gulls plunge into the sea.
In the distance you see something.
It must be sea-weed.
You keep walking.
Sandpipers race from the foam
leaving the hieroglyphics of their tiny tracks behind.
You’re thinking: What a quiet summer it has been—
when you glimpse a body receding with the tide.
A gull drops.
You push your way into the sea.
It sucks at your legs.
You fall back
plunge forward
fall back.
Through the smear of salt
you watch the bloated corpse of a woman
rise into view on a crest,
her tangled hair covering her face.
Another gull falls as she disappears.
Straining against the surf, you reach the body.
Her neck is twisted;
she stares backward,arms floating outstretched
like broken wings.
You grasp her clammy waist—
already slick
with the mucus
of a water death—
and struggle toward shore.
You drag her to the edge of the dunes
and fall panting on the sand.
It is a nightmare
you tell yourself.
But you know better.
You stare wildly up the beach.
It is still, deserted;
the flawless summer nearly over.
There is still time
to give her back.
Applicants
One by one
I watch them go in
and file out again.
I overhear
their stories—
as if Mr. Brown could care
about their lives
as much as their typing speeds
and the way they wear their hair.
Their dreams are all so similar
(and so similar to mine)
that even after thirty years
it’s like I’m walking in
with each one of them
each time
and walking out again
drained
of all that’s boxed inside.
No wonder they look so empty
when they take
Mr. Brown’s hand
and lie
that it was a pleasure
meeting him.
Then heave a sigh
and disappear
behind the elevator doors
like shells
of what they were before
they made this trip up here.
And they go
down,
down,
down
to face the blinding light
of noon in Midtown:
the breathless air, the strangled sky,
the next, and next, and next guy
with whom
they interview.
So what?
It’s how the world’s
always been.
At least just one unlucky girl
will have to make this trip upstairs again.
Dad
I have almost lost you completely,
can barely remember the curve of your jaw
your nose, your gray hair beneath a cap to ward off the sun.
I remember cigarette smoke, the smell of nicotine on your fingers.
But I cannot rearrange your features to make sense.
You are a puzzle.
I have the nose, blue eyes,
even the sound of your voice.
But I cannot assemble them into a proper face.
Sometimes, coming up from the A train at Columbus Circle,
hurrying to work, work, work,
I see you hunched in an overcoat against the wind
lighting a cigarette in the doorway of a deli on 8th Avenue.
But as I get closer you grow younger,
with a haircut not of your era,
brown eyes not blue,
your features already receding
into someone else’s face.
Protest
I´m against plants that don´t bloom,
faulty fireflies
blinking on and off;
I´m against noise and rudeness,
garbage and dead batteries,
and motors that won´t start,
and wet matches, and slow computers;
I´m totally against wounds and against tears,
against hunger and thirst, insomnia, envy…
“But señor,” —they say—
“you´re against all those things.
What political party do you support?”
Well, I am a proud one hundred-per-cent supporter,
and a life-long member, of the party of Love.
(written in Spanish by Jonathan Harrington
Translated into English by Fernando de la Cruz)
A Charmed Life
I remember one bitter winter
in Park Slope,
waiting with my cousin
for the A train
at Jay Street
to carry us over
the stinking Gowanus Canal.
I looked down the tracks
into the black tunnel
as if looking into hell.
I leaned out
straining to hear the bang
of metal on metal
and the scream of the train
as it bulleted into the station.
I won’t lie to you
I was drunk—
a young man drunk
on freedom and the City of Brooklyn,
with its rows of tenements,
like rotten teeth,
and piles of dirty snow.
I fell,
pitched forward
and broke my head open
on the tracks
just as the train shrieked
into the station.
My cousin,
God bless him,
pulled me back up
on the platform
and held my broken head
in his arms
and screamed at me
as the blood ran
all over his lap:
“You stupid son-of-a-bitch.”
I am lucky
to be writing this poem
today.
Subway
Somebody picks at the sores
of her new tattoo.
Somebody stares at the mustache
drawn over Madonna´s upper lip
on a torn poster.
Somebody listens to an Ipod
no one else can hear
her head thrusting back and forth
like a catatonic
or a strychnine victim.
Somebody mumbles her rosary.
Somebody reads the Daily News.
Headline: “Mother Tosses Baby From Roof.”
A crippled beggar clears his throat.
Somebody is praying.
Somebody studies a book on macroeconomics.
A woman is polishing her wedding ring with a tissue.
Somebody stares blankly at absolutely nothing.
A boy reads the sports section
over a hunchback’s shoulder.
Somebody sneezes.
A coach (whistle around his neck)
plots football strategies on a piece of graph paper.
A man and woman argue.
A little boy scratches his elbow.
Somebody is writing this poem.
photo by Dan Griffin
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Jonathan Harrington lives in an 18th century hacienda that he restored himself in rural Yucatán, Mexico where he writes and translates poetry from Spanish and Mayan. He is a weekly featured reader at Café Poesia and Café Pendulo in Mérida. He is on the permanent faculty of US Poets in Mexico and a reader for the University of Arkansas Press’ Miller Williams Poetry Prize. He has read poetry throughout the world and has been invited to the International Poetry Festival in Havana, Cuba, Semana Negra in Gijon, Spain and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his poems have appeared in Poetry East, The Texas Review, Main Street Rag, Green River Review, Kentucky Poetry Review, English Journal, Epitaph, Slant, Black Bear Review and many other publications. He has published two chapbooks: Handcuffed to the Jukebox and Aqui. His translations from the Spanish and Mayan have appeared in World Literature Today, Visions International, The Dirty Goat, International Review of Poetry. In addition to poetry, he has edited an anthology of short stories: New Visions: Fiction by Florida Writers, authored a collection of essays, Tropical Son: Essays on the Nature of Florida, and has published five novels, The Death of Cousin Rose, The Second Sorrowful Mystery, A Great Day for Dying, Saint Valentine’s Diamond, and Death on the Southwest Chief.
The Merida Review 
