Two Poems

by Arlene Ang

Depression

The burial took place in the night.

We were asleep and, in part, never woke up.

The building imploded. We relinquished

our skin to dust. Bones turned against us in pain.

We became voices. We listened.

Once in a while men would shout

that they have found the children when

what they meant was they have found silence.

The ground continued its seizures

leaving behind blanks in conversations.

There was an accountant nearby with a story

of three years in Friuli—the place died in his mouth

when he stopped speaking. We depended

on the elderly woman upstairs for she was closer

to the sky. She couldn't feel her legs and fell

from there. With our bodies, we waited.

There was evidence enough. That last air

we stashed noisily into our lungs.

That sound of shovels hitting debris.



The Lazarus

The storm ruptures the sky—
scrap metal and electric guitar, rushing
its wind through the poplars.
Did Lazarus embrace paradise
while his white robe flapped from his body?
There. A newspaper hits
the sidewalk, but the sidewalk
is involutely stronger than a woman.
It keeps me watching
behind the glass, desiring to be
the glass. The rain shifts my pulse—
luminous as gin on shards
of the broken bottle. Throughout his second
life, they say, Lazarus ached
for his sister, for her arms to hold him
in dying. It all comes back
to the body. The newspaper beats its pages
against the poplar's trunk, as if
to remind itself that it was once a tree.
Emptiness. Where can the reader be hiding?
I, too, am afraid to come out.
Paper shreds come off,
taste the asphalt. Across the street,
another face behind
the window. The Lazarus. Its awning a squint of red vanishing
down the road. Behind
the glass, the bartender moves
against physical things, drinking slowly.