Poems by Daisy Fried
Fasces
1.
When, under the avenue, I disembarked to oozy goo
that dripped from cracks that widen
each time a train slams through, and picking my slushy way
in my boots, quite randomly I remembered
the riddles that came on Dixie cups—
how do you make time fly—illustrated
in comic book style: a rage-tense hand
hurls an alarm clock—old-fashioned with hammers
and hats—out a window. Bracketed by crude
vibration lines, its demise through that window: glorious.
Another riddle: How dare you wake to change your story?
Eight floors above, ten minutes on, I peer out my classroom window
at a gaggle of tense men confabbing on the corner,
beards reseeding since morning like soil sown
across a pavement. Across the pavement,
strewn remains of a planter. Somebody thought
he had a message vis a vis predatory capital.
Somebody prey to capital picks up the pieces
of the planter and of the—now I’m seeing it—
smashed window: A girl in a turban
2.
whose ass they can’t help watching. Tense with a rage
I can hardly explain, I staple the pages of my syllabi
lain out before me with mean ka-chunks. I’m telling this
out of order and for scant reason: how I emerged
from the subway portal into a turbulence
of small men and a woman kicking another—
ribs, head, bang—till he lay still, and an ambulance
swooped to the curb with hiccupping strobe.
With heroic ideas in my head I dodged inside instead.
Evidence but of what? It wasn’t as ugly
as it could have been—the kicked man had tried,
it seemed, to steal. I guess he needed the money.
Fentanyl? I guess he’d seen
3.
better days. When my little brother tried heroin,
my big one dimed him out to our parents.
This was the 90s. That sent him into a rage.
Did they come to blows? People in my family
always in a rage. Well I wasn’t home. I was long gone.
Fast forward two decades. My unforgiving, strongman
brother sent me a limerick mocking my husband,
who was dying; I critiqued his poem. Meter wobbly
in the second line…language of invective unoriginal.
When my other brother—addled from a brew
of bad chemicals, disappointment, and a grandiosity
falling just short of charm, brother I actually love—
repeated over and over, as if he’d come
upon a marvelous phrase, the only women who
want to date me are ugly, fat, and middle-aged,
I finally said, provoked to provoke, maybe
you just don’t like women’s bodies, maybe it’s
other bodies you want. He clawed through
his mountain man beard, spittle-shouted in my face,
you fucking dominatrix in dominatrix boots.
I looked at my feet. Well. They’re not thigh-high,
nor vinyl, nor accessorized with corset and shackles,
nor set like pile dwellings above a swamp on stilts.
Flat-heeled riding-style boots, have you any power?
I begin to take an interest in life. Why do elephants
wear tennis shoes when they jump from tree to tree—
So they won’t wake the neighbors. Boots unadorned
zippered, stretch at the knee, I walk
to hear you thumping the floor like a cane,
like bleeps on a dying man’s EKG.
§
Note: “Fasces”: a bundle of rods with a projecting axe blade, carried in ancient Roman processions as a symbol of power, also used as an emblem of authority in Fascist Italy.
New Deal Photography 7. Cut at the Thigh: Jack Delano, 1940/1941
——-Verso
Soft and but one girth
from jowl to thigh
at which the photo
cuts her off, her trunk
obscured by shapeless
kirtle, soft and floppy
arms folded against
what must be (it’s December)
cold, and to hide flattish
unsecured breasts. The same month
plutonium was first
isolated and produced
at Berkeley, and the Nazis
bombed Sheffield, England,
she, “wife of a Farm Security
Administration client,” with
shingled Wickford shack
as backdrop
against which rests
broken-slatted Flexible Flyer
on snowless ground,
turns stiffly her head
to look past her shoulder,
her expression equally
derisive and engagé.
——-Recto
And in September
the following year,
Babi Yar, and orders
for the yellow star,
and Yankees clinch
the pennant race, and
Citizen Kane, and Bernie
Sanders and my Pa born,
and Lindbergh says
“the greatest danger
to this country” is Jews.
In Tunbridge, Vermont,
“Wrestler at World’s Fair,”
with buzzcut and naked nips
stands in front of a canvas tent
painted with men in underpants
pulling hair and punching
maws and guts. He
holds the shaft and element
of his mic to his curling lip. Hand
on his hip, his torso muscled
quite upstanding, singlet
hotpants grip his junk.
Wires show as shadows
behind his head.
Scalloped tent-edge jagged
like teeth through which
all at the fair
will move like prey.
What more to show or say.
He squints in sun, and talks
to get the crowd to come. His massive
thighs brushed with hair seem
scribbled on with ash and air.
§
Note: This is one of a series of poems that share a title taken from the book New Deal Photography, in which appear the photos referenced in these poems.
Daisy Fried is the author of five books of poetry, including the forthcoming My Destination (Flood/Carcanet 2026) and, most recently, The Year the City Emptied (Flood, 2022). The recipient of Guggenheim, Hodder, and Pew Fellowships, an occasional poetry critic for the New York Times, Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere, and a member of the poetry faculty of the MFA Program For Writers at Warren Wilson College, she lives in Philadelphia.
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