Local News from Someplace Else. Marjorie Maddox

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      satellite dishes dot suburban lawns,

      click code into unsuspecting homes.

      Here is not anywhere close

      to captions crossing television screens,

      unconvincingly disguising our town

      as Tulsa or Tuscaloosa

      where the same two masked men

      stick up a shiny gas station,

      smile suspiciously into the eye

      of the security camera.

      Perhaps they are you

      or your cousins traveling through

      another state or time

      into this 27-inch space

      of otherworldliness, the familiar

      and foreign switching uniforms

      to the tune of Time and Temperature.

      It is always snowing or raining

      someplace like here

      while our own windows lie

      their pretend sunshine

      on a street somewhat like yours.

      Whom can we trust

      when a smiling anchor

      prophesies the utmost danger

      around the corner

      of tomorrow? Today, someone’s

      floods will rise up

      past the screen, our remote a small boat

      of numbers, helpless with no

      SOS in the making.

      Brushfires will spark from antennae

      hunching too close to our house

      while hurricanes huff through wires.

      We try to look outside

      to our own doings, but all fingers

      are frozen. No matter

      what channel we pay,

      there is still no news from home.

      Best Friend

      Hound Shoots Croatian Hunter

      –Newspaper Headline; Jutarnji List Daily, 10/04

      I could have told you, Spaso Ivosevic,

      this is the way of all clichés on friendship.

      If not your back, then your ankle,

      the bullet path centimeters outside

      your peripheral vision,

      the pain, yes, unexpected, but as inevitable

      as the woods’ lure, the joy

      of the kill.

      You’ll live but with a limp,

      if you’re lucky, a scar

      large enough to warn others,

      yourself.

      Sure, you tell me he was chasing

      chickens, stormed past, for just a second,

      turned those puppy eyes

      on something else. Such loyalty,

      you’d hate to put him down. What does it matter—

      gun propped against the wall,

      you, a veteran? I’ve heard it before,

      typed up the medical reports

      seconds before that other gunshot,

      the one aimed for the head.

      Safe

      My baby and I stay home

      from the funeral for the murdered child,

      unrecognizably battered and stabbed

      in last week’s news photos.

      The police arrive early

      at the church, the estranged wife

      and husband, separated by rows of pews,

      glare at photographers, suspect

      each other. They have both

      aimed guns. My husband lights

      church candles around the girl’s enlarged

      classroom photo, prays

      for us. What is safe lurks

      nowhere near, doubt encrypting

      fear, the way we cross

      ourselves in our cloistered home.

      We stare nightly at neighbors

      walking too close to the nursery window,

      too close to the woods

      where the girl was found,

      her arms criss-crossed just so

      as if by a parent who can

      no longer sleep.

      Fifth-grader Imagined Taking Over School

      –Newspaper Headline; Wellsboro, PA

      All the safe, small towns—

      gas streetlights silly in retrospect—

      proclaim surprise. What else

      when their children’s open

      veins stain the school tiles?

      Here the cornstalks stay calm;

      the cost-of-living low?

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