The Only Thing that Stops Bad Guys
Leopards have been eating people in our neighborhood. Specifically, they’ve been eating faces. For some reason, leopards like faces best. It’s been going on for a while now. Some say the leopards escaped from a carnival. Others insist they are part of a military experiment gone wrong. But nobody really knows where they came from or why they are hanging around our neighborhood. What we do know is that we do not want our faces eaten. So we learn everything we can about leopards. Ultimately, we realize they respect only power—the power of predators. We consider eating the faces off folks from the next town over, to show the leopards we are their equals: messing with us would be like leopards taking on leopards, a stalemate at best! But this might not be enough to deter them. We need to do more than simply match the leopards; we need to outclass them. So we decide to get lions. (Gary from down at the end of the street proposed buying a pack of hyenas, and everybody just snickered. His suggestions are always so weird.) The lions aren’t cheap, and we can’t take them out of their cages without risking attack. So mostly we just stay near our locked-up lions, waiting to teach those leopards a lesson. Everybody worries about whether we have enough lions. Also, everybody worries about how to get the lions back in their cages after we release them against the leopards. Yet nobody has any ideas for solving the problem—not even Gary.
Fourth of July from a High-rise
Thirty stories away from the throng in the street below, every light out in our hotel room, we press too close to the pane. The sky spectacle fades just as it is getting started. We spy no starbursts, no brocades of light, just our own ghostly faces reflected in double-thick safety glass. Yet with a step backwards, our view opens onto the past. Explosions of color blind us,
send us back to childhood, to belief our forebears glided across clouds and left them unblemished. This patriotic apparition bolts like a terrier slipped its leash when I ask if our cannons blazed so brightly when blowing up enemies across the centuries. I can’t tell if you’re listening since you don’t immediately reply. Then you frown and complain: Up here, fireworks are too quiet like watching TV on mute. It’s true the shrieks and crackles, kabooms and whistles that should make it impossible to hear ourselves think register merely as whispers. We say nothing more as we watch the firmament redly shimmer, as if once more on fire.
Noel Sloboda has published two books of poetry as well as seven chapbooks, most recently Creature Features (Mainstreet Rag, 2022). Currently, he is an Associate Professor at Penn State York, where he coordinates the English program.