Poetry by Victor D. Infante

      liebeslakritze CC




No Treble
For L.G.

They're selling Vietnamese food at the Hotel Vernon now.
It sometimes seems a small rip in the fabric of the universe –
we turned a corner into a subtly different alternate dimension. 

Perhaps the changes to dive bars are the one true barometric
of a city's transformation. Freshly cleaned beer taps, new lighting fixtures –
watch quietly from your bar stool and it unfolds like a tulip:

Far too pretty, now. Too delicate for what you think the world
really is, what it should be, what it was before you blinked
and a disease, a baseball park and a few million dollars

made a fun house mirror of familiar street corners. And maybe
that's OK. Some nights Millbury Street is alive with drag queens,
and there's a place to buy weed legally. There are empanadas  

in Kelley Square, and crepes and boba tea. Water Street is still
a parade of drunks, sometimes – I still warn young friends
not to leave their drinks unattended. There are still fistfights 

over Red Sox games. There are still people howling their damage
to an unrelenting sky. Sometimes this place hasn't changed
as much as people think, although it's no longer a dollar for a 'Gansett.

Some nights, there is a bass thump that underscores the sound of traffic,
joy and dancing emanating from a nightclub and hookah bar. We forget,
each moment is only that – a moment – and the beat still echoes into night.





​Outside the Host of Philistines 

This is when you ask the real questions: When the published poems have faded into lemon juice, the audience retreated on buses to Tacoma or Lowell, the articles pulped and repurposed as particle board, the novel just a distant itch in some literary agent's ear, and there is nothing left but postage stamps and silence.

Where you are with the language: When it sits scowling across the breakfast table from you, coffee left undrunk and cooling, bacon burned to a crisp. You wake with the language draped naked across your torso, and from the moment you open your eyes, you try to decide what this lifelong dalliance means.

You have mansions of notebooks. You disappear inside them for days, emerge half-starved with armfuls of paper. On each page the word “help” is written over and over. You recite it like a Buddhist chant, and everyone applauds. Someone says, “You should upload that to Bandcamp. Everyone should hear it.”

The language fails you again. Charitably, you think you ask too much of it: to be lover, shelter, bridge and deck of tarot cards, to be friend and pet and doorway, camera aperture and food. Anything strained that far will surely snap, and maybe that was the point all along.

It vanishes on walkabout one morning, and you make breakfast alone. You sip green tea and read about last night's Red Sox game. The guy on the sports page has a way with words, and silently you hate him a little. You wonder where language has gone. You wonder if it's coming back. You talk, but all you can say is the word “help,” and no one wants to hear that again, so you sew your lips shut.

You go to work rearranging commas, move clauses from one sentence to another, undo a typo or two. You take a word off the page than put it back, then remove it again. You wonder if anyone will send you a postcard from Tacoma, which is a place you've never been. You've been to Lowell, though. You had a hamburger there, but can't remember the name of the cafe. You remember it was overdone.

At home, you have stacks of albums of the things you and language did together – mementos of days beneath a chalkboard sky. Each letter written was the size of a building, all upper case and bold. Language seemed smaller when it left, you think. You try to remember its kiss.

There is something welling in your chest, and you realize it has always been there. Language had always kept it at bay. Perhaps you should have thanked it. Maybe it would still be here. You draw the shades and lock the doors, turn up the stereo so the neighbors can't hear you sob. 

You shake and cry until you are empty. It takes longer than you imagined it would. You repeat the word “help” over and over, until the mantra seeps into the walls. You wonder what would happen if you gave language a call. What would you be if it returned? What will you be when you unlock the door?

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Victor D. Infante is the features editor for The Worcester Telegram & Gazette and the editor for Worcester Magazine. He has appeared in dozens of journals, including The Chiron Review, The Collagist, Barrelhouse, Pearl, Spillway and The Banyan Review, as well as in anthologies such as "Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry," "Spoken Word Revolution Redux," "The Last American Valentine: Poems to Seduce and Destroy," "Aim For the Head: An Anthology of Zombie Poetry," "The Incredible Sestina Anthology" and all three "Murder Ink: Tales of New England Newsroom Crime" anthologies.  His first full-length poetry collection, “City of Insomnia,” was published by Write Bloody Publishing, and his poetic novella, "Suffer For This," is set to come out later this year on Moon Tide Press.   He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and their army of ferrets.
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