{"id":1154,"date":"2014-03-20T02:45:07","date_gmt":"2014-03-20T02:45:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turtlepointpress.com\/traveltainted\/?p=1154"},"modified":"2015-07-21T16:55:45","modified_gmt":"2015-07-21T20:55:45","slug":"three-poems-by-kelly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turtlepointpress.com\/traveltainted\/three-poems-by-kelly\/","title":{"rendered":"Atlantic City \/ The Foreigners Who Trained With My Husband \/ Smoke"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Atlantic City<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In the forties my grandmother worshipped
\nsand as pale as Irish skin, the sirens
\nof casinos on summer afternoons.
\nOne night, walking home from a dance,
\na corsage red as a heart on her wrist,
\nshe heard the footsteps of a man behind her,
\nquick and slow, quick and slow.
\nThese were the months of the boardwalk murders,
\nthe curfews and pocketknives slipped into stockings,
\nbut in the end she was saved by a gate\u2014a latch
\nshe knew and he did not\u2014and a sprint to the front door,
\nwhile a neighbor\u2019s lights came on, yellow
\nas a cat\u2019s eyes in the dark.<\/p>\n

In the fifties she married a man who drank
\naway the scalded bodies of Nagasaki, and
\nhow many nights did she wake then to the rattle
\nof a latch in the yard, the footsteps
\nof a man at the edge of her bed,
\nso her daughter could have a daughter who
\nloved the ocean too but saw
\nthe wreckage of a different war.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Foreigners Who Trained With My Husband<\/span><\/strong>
\na tanka<\/em><\/p>\n

They brought their wives to
\nthat hot Texas base to have
\nfine, Yankee babies.<\/p>\n

How lonely those dark, bellied
\nwomen were, always smiling.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Smoke<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Beside the highway, a tower of black smoke was rising
\nlike a phoenix over the treeline, and a dozen cars were parked
\non the overpass, the drivers leaning over the railing
\nwith their doors flung open. Getting out of my car,<\/p>\n

I was knocked back by the smell; it was a smell I had known
\nonly once in my life, standing on a hill in New Jersey
\nas the ash floated out of the City. But when I moved closer
\nto the side of the road, I could tell it was not a building on fire,<\/p>\n

but some kind airplane\u2014and in the blare of the sirens
\nI couldn\u2019t hear what the woman next to me was saying, but
\nthe car radio was saying it was a jet, a pilot had gone down
\non Birdneck Road\u2014and for a moment in the April glare,<\/p>\n

I thought I could see my husband climbing over the edge
\nof the railing in his flight suit,
\nuntil my phone rang, and it was the skipper\u2019s wife
\ncalling to say, it wasn\u2019t one of ours, it wasn\u2019t one of ours\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n

and only then did I turn back to the crowd on the overpass,
\nall those people with their hands over their mouths,
\n<\/span>and all I could think was how three minutes later
\nit might have been my car down there, and it might<\/p>\n

have been my husband\u2019s plane, and what God is this
\nwho stayed the union of our darkest imaginations?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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