Man Forgot His Bowler Hat, Margaret Viboolsittiseri. Source: Issue Two

TWO POEMS

by David M. Brunson

What Country

I wanted to write your name in the smoke

of burning tires,

of tear gas canisters shot at friends,

of rocks thrown back at tanks,

of the books and migrant camps

blazing in the lowlands.

I felt your concrete river flow through me,

saw your oil glisten across the bellies

of trout, across bodies pushed

from bridges, pushed to asphalt

by lead or knee. What country, crushed

beneath the weight of copper,

cotton, or coltan? Gashed landscape,

mountain’s wound:

to whom do I address this poem?

Ceora

One Saturday night, we piled into The Jazz Corner—

Néstor, Sara, and I— to hear you play.

Your wide frame filled the stage, unkempt

and sweating, your trumpet’s shadow cast across

the floor, checkered green in the absinthe light.

The Santiago summer swelled with cigarette

smoke through the club’s sealed windows

as the bass thumbed with the traffic’s howl, electric

guitar and Rhodes piano pinging across plates

of tapas and glasses of Marchigüe wine. The joint

was too expensive for us, but we were there anyway.

The saxophone ran a blues lick, an altissimo squeal,

until the drums brought it back down to the head.

Then we cheered for your break:

your trumpet lines seized the room, shouted

Right here! Right here! until the bar’s late-night din

clinked quiet. You took another round, raised two

trumpets to your lips, spit dripping from puffed cheeks

as you blew them both, a little Latino lilt,

a little New York jive, all that swagger and bravado.

Goddamn, how you could play. And before

we had the chance to catch our breath, you counted

off a Lee Morgan tune, a ballad written some years

before he bled to death, shot in the city’s dirty snow.

But then you broke into tears, laid down your horn,

overcome with the sorrow of it all, just a few months

before your lungs gave out, and now I too

lay down these lines, these tears, for you.

David M. Brunson’s poems and translations have appeared in or are forthcoming from Copper Nickel, ANMLY, Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, Booth, Washington Square Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Poetry Online, The Bitter Oleander, Nashville Review, Asymptote, DIAGRAM, Journal of Italian Translation, and elsewhere. He is the editor and translator of A Scar Where Goodbyes Are Written: An Anthology of Venezuelan Poets in Chile.