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University of Northern Iowa
At Close RangeAuthor(s): Erin MaloneSource: The North American Review, Vol. 287, No. 1 (Jan. - Feb., 2002), p. 24Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25126705 .
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NAR
ERIN MALONE
At Close Range
Voices fire and a car
bangs down the night. I can't quiet
the hammer in my head?I look at you?did I hear it right? Three rapid snaps,
your eyes flashed open. So this is nothing
I fished from sleep's black marsh,
gills tacked and stuck
with fear: it bleeds
because it's real. Check the windows
to see who falls. We're transparent
in red light / blue light, a warbled pattern
drowning out our ears. Our mouths
hang. When the bleary scene dries, we search for fragments, reports
in the paper, but there's only a powder
of glass, trace evidence
on the sun-glittered street?
no hollow shell still ringing, whatever war there was, erased.
LEE ANN RORIPAUGH
DDT
My parents learned to hear
the hollow crumple of gravel in the alley, the lumbering hum of
the truck's engine even
in their sleep, and could leap from their bed at pre-dawn?
snapping on all the lights,
storm windows shimmying down screens to hit bottom with a metallic click, the outer windows slammed
shut, topped by a squeaky twist
of the lock for good measure. Both former war children, this was all executed
with the precision of
an air-raid drill?I could hear my mother's bare feet
pat the floor as she moved
from window to window,
calling out, DDT! DDT! Don't you breathe!
It frightened me to wake
this way and I would hold
my breath, squeezing my face deep into the pillow, sure that a single whiff
would either kill me dead or instantly transform me into a child of
thalidomide. The well
planned world my parents mapped had grown venomous and strange with Charlie Manson,
Kent State, Agent Orange,
LSD. The truck came
by again at dusk, and the neighborhood children
ran behind it?the sweet
spray of the pesticide
cooling the heat and dust from their bodies, settling on the backs of their tongues
like finely misted sugar water. And once again, my parents would repeat
their ritual of sealing
24 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW January-February 2002
This content downloaded from 193.105.154.120 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 23:51:34 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
