Four Poems by Roger W. Hecht
Like Scissors
Like scissors they snip the chemical threads that hold a live thing together: bacteria, fungus, primordial swarm. Then we’re gas. Then we become element: phosphorus, carbon, something a live plant can claim. Dead, we’re soup, we’re cheese, we’re the meal we’re invited to but can never enjoy. Enjoyed-- if a mold knows joy-- let’s say sated on, feted because we’re feast, the last supper we’ll never know because by then we’re already being resurrected back into the body of the world. |
Signs
The Romans read entrails to discern the future. We read stools for signs: too much fiber, cancer, foreclosure. The Jews force-fed maggots to Roman goats to buy themselves time in the dust of Masada. We eat Kale & cabbage, açai bowls sprinkled with chia seeds, determined to extend our days another day. You’ll find us tending our gut flora with the acuity of termites turning a forest to soil. & in the time, It’s taken to tend these lines another species has died-- a fish, a frog, an insect—unseen by us, who’ve tried so hard to interpret the signs of the world we made, ignoring our spot in the extinction parade. |
Sonnet from misread lines
After "ficus carica sonnet" by Hua Ngyuen The cicada belt hugs the heart: in any three trees in Tokyo they sing you to distraction; in the glassy rain-drenched mountains they scream in neither anger nor fear. Snow infects this April Where tree blossoms should be. The seasons have been Long unsettled--we're feeling the brunt of it now. If only we listened to the animals when we could. Snow settles like cigarette ash. We huddle like children Dreaming of insects in our dug out caves. What would we ask of the spirits, leaving us One by one, if it ever occurred to us to interview them Before they departed the room? I strain hard For any sound other than the scavenger birds pecking the snow, stopping to cough, then rising like blurred smoke in the storm. For Isao Takahata 4-6-18 |
One Step Ahead of Them
Donald Trump’s administration has reportedly banned the Center for Disease Control from using seven words and phrases, including “science-based” and “transgender,” in documents it is working on for next year's budget. --Newsweek, Dec.16, 2017 Being between being & not being is precarious for the fetus, who nonetheless marvels at her place in the diversity of life. A speck among specks, he never feels vulnerable and she never succumbs to a sense entitlement for wearing the crown called human. Trans-species, transgender, he crosses all boundaries, though encased in a science-based bubble confirming the reality she assumes. Though science based its projections of the future by plotting the past, the fetus knows nothing of this since past is present & all things transgender transgress the binary systems that keeps diversity in a corner, chained to a chair that the demons of entitlement locked tight & swallowed the key. Now we are no longer vulnerable to the things we fear, they proclaim, measuring their voices against the vulnerable pillars they erected to keep their sky intact. Despite science-based research revealing fissures in their foundation, the aura of entitlement makes their certainty seem inviolable. Meanwhile, the fetus drifts unawares, mapping planets on her womb wall, the diversity of stars he imagines exploring once she exits through the transom transgender, translating his dreams into solid fields of action, trans gender- ripples across dark matter. This unseen substance should leave her vulnerable, but he intuits that metaphor accounts for only half of diversity and of all the sense of wonder that science, based in Capital, aims to nail down if not to nail shut. She thinks, fetus: is that even close to the potentiality within? Our entitlement is that we shall hence renounce our sense of entitlement. In the womb we cut down craving with the cord. Transgender transcends lust & greed. A new child shall rise. Oh fetus, if only thy thoughts were true! If only we could be invulnerable to the demons of our power, to the machinations of science-based systems that unlock so they can control the diversity of the biome, the diversity of the psyche, the diversity of the heart. Ho, ho, ho, the tragic voices of entitlement bellow with derision. The hills tremble. Still, against this thunder science-based agents of virtue plant small bombs of doubt in their bombast, sow transgender transactions into the public proceedings, & the vulnerable gain a foothold in the sunlight, if for only a minute, to breathe. The fetus waits. He tests the waters, the diversity of molecules. The fetus has science-based diagrams of the levers of power. Transgender transfiguring the fall of entitlement. Now to empower the vulnerable. |
Roger W. Hecht is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY College at Oneonta. His poetry collection, Talking Pictures, was issued by Cervena Barva Press. His work has recently appeared in Bracken, A-Minor, Sheila-na-gig, and Yes Poetry. He lives in Ithaca, NY.