Bonaparte
Napoleon rises at dawn, inspects the pool lights. They flicker on the side of his tent. He adjusts his tricorn and walks into the empty city, filled with lamentations and abandoned cookfires. He frowns and gets off his horse. Where are the people? His horse shakes his arched neck and snorts. Napoleon mounts and swears at his officers.
He studies the pool lights, re-enters his tent, pulls off his uniform. The tricorn he sets on a special table of varnished mahogany. A letter has come for him from Josephine. Napoleon frowns and takes the letter with him to bed. His boots gleam in the corner of the tent.
Josephine is agitated. Her writing growls, moans, soothes, disturbs. Napoleon thinks of throwing it into the fire, reconsiders. He sews it into his battle coat. This takes time. Soon, it is time for dinner.
His generals strut and slip on the guts of cattle and goats whose throats have been slit. His soldiers gather the entrails and re-ignite the cookfires. Napoleon watches them with disgust. Fuck Russia. He wants to fuck Mother Russia badly. Taking his quill, he writes a simple note of agitation to Josephine, then begins a note to his mother. All the important events end before they begin, he writes. He continues in this vein until dawn, then throws the letter into the fire.
The snow, he thinks. The snow will visit, taking little bits of us with it. His Grand Armée will become part of the earth, faces of dead soldiers upturned in rivers as at Austerlitz. The snow falls, far into the interior, lands on white haired history books yet to be written like unfed birds. He hears a soldier’s snowball toppling a snowman, a snowman with an alarm clock for a heart deep inside him tuned to the beating of Josephine’s black heart.
Greenland, Greenland
The president called and ordered Greenland. As usual there was a bad connection on Maui, so I thought he said Foodland and picked up a dozen eggs. I texted a pic to the prez who exploded in anger. Ketchup, wall. “No, you idiot, the country. GREENLAND.” He spelled it out for me. I was sure he said Japan, so I caught the next flight from Kahului. I stopped first at a Buddhist temple, because who better to ask than monks in orange bathrobes? I sat cross-legged across from a monk named Ken. I told him that the president had ordered up Japan, pronto. Ken had a shaved head and Elton John spectacles. I may have selected the wrong temple. Ken assured me that I was in fact in Japan, although illegally. I told him the president selected me for this mission because (and then I made up a reason). Ken nodded, reflected. “Breathe,” he purred. I breathed and thought the president is going to shoot me over a country with no electoral votes. I began to feel he was a menace to diamonds that shiver in flowerbeds and to me (though I was a cousin to Marla Maples and had made Page 6 more times than OJ since he died). Ken suggested that I try the Danish. So back I went to Foodland. It was a long flight. I was a top advisor. I could handle this. I fell asleep on the flight. This gig is exhausting. I dreamt for hours of hospitals, hotels, and jails, a raped piano. Donald and I. Beautiful and naked, the wives slept before the fire.
Gary Percesepe is the author of twelve books, including Moratorium: Collected Stories, named by Kirkus Review one of the top 100 Indie books of 2022. Percesepe’s new poetry collection is titled The Girl of My Dream. He lives on Maui with his family.