Under Regime
—They’re closing in. They’re three houses down, they think we live down there. Maybe the rain’s blurred the numbers.
They really want you. Sure, it was free speech, but free only to those who could buy it. You knew that. You knew it. Even they can’t buy it anymore. Any minute they’ll find you don’t live down there. And who cares who it was—maybe the Millers, yeah—but we’ve gotta leave.
—I saw six. Four went in, two waiting outside. One’s on the sidewalk by the stairs, one by the black van.
They’d see us leave. But if we went out back you’d have to climb fences—you couldn’t do it, your leg.
—We’ll go out front. Which way? No: if we went up, they’d see, we’d have to pretend we don’t notice the flashing lights, the commotion.
Okay, then: you’re right: toward them, past them. Here: try my glasses. No: too small for your face.
—An umbrella: I’ll hold the umbrella, you’ll smile at them as we pass. We’ll be in conversation, you and I.
Okay, but you can’t laugh, a laugh attracts.
—Conversation. You be on the street side. I’ll say something, you’ll look at me, away from them. What shall I say? “No, I don’t think so,” maybe.
No: no flips the mind, it goes to yes, yes is a trigger.
—“He was alone.”
No: another trigger.
—“I wonder how their kids are?”
That’s it. Wait: he looks too young to have kids, the one at the van.
—The kids, then. The kids. No, their kids: we’ll stay with their kids. Give me a kiss. Keep your eyes down. Here we go.
A Request for Three Imaginings
—after Alta Ifland
Imagine, if you would, a soldier, alone in a war zone, remote place, wet place or dry. For days they have been under attack. In his tent one night he decides to sleep naked. Strips off his boots, his heavy clothes, even his dog tags. Imagine the tender place inside his thighs, the soft hair on his belly, the smooth small of his back, and, on his shaved head, the concave spot, also soft, where neck meets skull. He’s not shell-shocked, he’s not nuts nor blinded by flash nor deafened by bombs.
In the dry place, the soldier decides to walk out onto a high dune and watch the stars. He’s good at finding Polaris. He lies at the top of a dune, it’s quiet and dark and stars are bright. He spreads his arms and legs, looks and finds Polaris. He goes back to his tent and sleeps.
In the wet place, the soldier decides to go swimming. He goes down to the pond, which is still clean, having never before known war, and he swims to the other side of the water, swims back, his breaststroke sure, gets out of the water, goes back to his tent, and sleeps.
Nothing will happen to these soldiers in this poem.
Imagine again, if you would, something more about soldiers: that in the towns they invade, the citizens are made of glass: luminous, their arterial blood red, their venous blood blue, the capillaries flowering yellow, each organ in each body limned, translucent. Their blood pulses, blue river, red river, the architecture of their organs little chapels inside the body’s cathedral. And every hour on the hour there’s a magnification: the beating of every heart in town is heard, each in its own time, in its proper key, the noise Bach dreamed of, and under that sound, the great organ notes of human lungs, the soft-hewn pipes of alveoli. The people walk hand in hand sometimes, as people do. Though their bodies are glass, they still buy croissants, still buy cucumbers. Nothing will happen to them in this poem.
Imagine, if you would, finally, that a new rule is in place: all soldiers, young or old, recruit or draftee, must pull a cart, carrying in that undraining cart everyone they’ve injured, everyone they’ve killed, pull it not just in time of war, but all of life thereafter.
Oh, they do, I hear you saying, they do.
Gift Cat
—for Petr Hruška
The cat steps out of the house: tattered tuxedo, top hat, umbrella for a cane.
I don’t know where he came from—gift of sheared telomeres somewhere, gapped synapse… That’s why he’s on his back legs—synapting now for both of us, see?— crackling inside our brains.
It’s an old house, dark wood, the porch half-rotted, two stairs collapsed, so the cat needs to hop over a hole in the porch then spring down, does that clumsily for a cat, hobbles a bit, recovers, & now he’s off.
For you & me, too late to go back: you’ve got your cat, I’ve got mine.
That hole in the porch: what’s below it? Spiders, wood debris in the dirt? Or do you see that it’s a basement: an old man down there sanding a piece of cherrywood under shoplight?
Is the man yours? Ours? And why’s he weeping?
I sense you hinting I should kneel, take a soil sample there in your dirt, among your battalion of spiders? At least warn me what kind of spiders they are and I promise I’ll tell you why the man’s weeping.
The cat’s creating problems between us. We’ve agreed he’s on his back feet, he’s in motion, tuxedo, top hat. But what kind of cat for you—Persian, Abyssinian, Burmese? I feel I should have some say in these things, but okay—if you insist yours is Manx, sure—just let me have my Abyssinian, known for uprightness in all things.
The man’s weeping because he feels unrecognized to an extreme, has been sanding that wood for forty-two years, he’s up to 1000 grit sandpaper, no one appreciates its smoothness. It’s only the collapsing porch & resultant hole that have made him visible, but he’s been sanding so long his lungs are filled with dust—forty percent capacity—and even if he could wheeze a short sound he’s forgotten the word for help.
Would the cat have helped him, anyway?
The cat’s got some distance on us now: where’s he going? You see him in your brain, I in mine, certainly the tuxedoes different, the house/the porch/the hobble, but there he is for us both, heading across field/lane/frontage road, he has intention, he dressed like this for a reason & we’ve no control of him, do we: we’ve done what we could & he’s gotten away: this gift cat multiplied many times by now, this cat so silent, arrogant, marauding downtown somewhere, oblivious to us, his creators.
After the Sudden Smiting, the Football Fan, Face-up in His Coffin,
Spirit Still Hovering, is Spoken to by God
You booed. Your team had lost, the other coach stepped to the podium, said he “thanked the Lord,” you stood in the stands, you booed.
In the seventies you saw that kid hit by the truck on Fourth Street and you merely wept, didn’t do a thing to help, but you cursed me each school shooting, took my Name in vain at the minefield explosions, the invasions: Iraq, Israel, then Gaza, cursed me from your car at the massacres there, looked down the good nose I gave you at those who believe in me, called them primitives, swore you’d not hedge your deathbed bets & convert, muttered at me daily, cynical, dissatisfied always, but Sunday you booed, you stood & booed, and while some put their hands to their mouths in shame, some laughed, one thrust thumbs up (he’s toes up now, I tell you)—you booed.
What you do with your bodies—slam them against each other by way of love or hate or sport or dance or chance, no concern of mine.
My gift to you was language—articulation, intonation, nuance, and such verbs!—I enticed you with delusions of linear time, gave you preterit, crafted past perfect, tossed in future perfect—with three words you’d predict the future and an end to it—what power!—I gave you rhetoric & its tricks: metaphor, aphorism, epithet—gave you myths & the mouth with which to say them, the motifs to make more. I distinguished you, raised you up from the brute din, and what did you do?
You booed.
The Numbers
You have a desire to phone your dead friends. It comes suddenly, and the numbers, the ones by heart, come rumbling in the old way, words to digits: Overland 1-4392. Lombard 4-8784. Seabright 1-6981. Bayview 7-1938.
They can’t possibly still exist, these numbers, but they did once, so you try.
You dial one: the Overland. She who’d said I put Pond’s Cold Cream on my face every night before I go to bed. Try it! Grew up in Indian lands, Lakota Country, lived to ninety-five. The number goes through, it rings and rings, and you’re surprised at how many you stay for, each ring echoing in its copper line, and soon it scares you, echoes endless, deep space, so you hang up.
Now the Lombard, his Triumph motorcycle though Lake County helmetless, summer, hot air blowing, your arms around his belly—big even then—and who that friend was to become to you and yours, unknowable then but hinted at in that wind, that enveloping. An answering machine: a woman’s voice, very young. Time expands, conflates, another woman, swimming in the Yuba River, both of you in love with her. You do not leave a message. What could you possibly say?
And this one: Seabright 1-6981: your own. The boys teased you about it, sexual jokes then. A voice: The number you have called has been disconnected. You dial again to be sure. A relief, in a way, this disconnection: things you never said to father, mother, brother, sister. The first two, long gone: would they care?
Now the Bayview, the poet friend whose picture you see daily at your desk: he’d smile & shake his head if he knew, but still you dial. Answering machine: his voice. His kids have kept it there. It’s a kind of cruelty, and after a silence, hesitation, you want to leave a message but hang up, want to call back, say Bill, I’m still here: a purple geranium’s blooming, sound of water in the creek changes as the wind blows—yes I’m writing but dream often of ciphers & numbers, patterns unrolling in a black sky, & some of those numbers I dial and last night found one that answered, and all it kept saying was Hello, Hello, and all I could say in the dream was I’m sorry, I’m so very sorry.
Gerald Fleming’s most recent book is The Bastard and the Bishop, prose poems (Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn). Previous titles are One, an experiment in monosyllabic prose poems (Hanging Loose), The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers, San Francisco), Night of Pure Breathing (Hanging Loose), Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers), and others. His work has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies over the past fifty years, most recently in Best American Poetry 2025. He lives most of the year in the San Francisco Bay Area.
