Alexandra Umlas

October 24, 2023

“The American Political Sestina” by Alexandra UmlasPosted by

Alexandra Umlas

THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SESTINA

… the American political poem is a safe poem.
—from “Political Poetry” by Kwame Dawes

A daughter asks her mother if humanitarian is the
same thing as volunteer. They are an American
family—a wine-salesman, a teacher, far from political.
They eat boxes of cereal, pet their cats. Sometimes a poem
will begin to form in the mother’s head, and life is
slow enough that there is time to write it, safe
 
from forgetfulness, on the page, which is also safe,
because even when it gets there, it can stay put. The
cat purrs in the corner. Sometimes dinner is
cooking on the stove. The National Public American
radio station is playing news or sometimes a poem
will weave its way onto the station. Sometimes it’s political,
 
but mostly it’s a poem about nothing political,
about hats, or who wears them, or about other safe
activities, like eating a peach. Or sometimes the poem
is slightly political, but the message is quiet, the
lines full of assonance and other beautiful American
things like sitting in a park one evening because it is
 
a Tuesday, and you can. Sometimes the poem is
filled with a quote about something, maybe political,
but the author of the poem is an American
and likes to write sestinas, and we know how safe
sestinas are—all those words repeating so that the
message just keeps recycling. The words in the poem
 
are the, American, political, is, safe, and poem,
because the careful author of the poem is
trying (of course) to write more than just words, the
important stuff evades her, in part because the political
is not the cereal box or the purr of the cat or anything safe,
and she is driving with her daughter on American
 
roads, and there will always be the problem of American
writers wanting to make a difference with a poem,
and the woman’s daughter is just coming home safe
from school and she asks something—she is
listening to the radio, listening to the news, the political
comes into the car. Why am I the one eating the
 
snack, safe because of where I was born, (on American
soil) but the girl on the radio is running from bombs? No poem
can explain this. Fair is the opposite of political.
 

—from Poets Respond
October 24, 2023

__________

Alexandra Umlas: “On Monday I took my daughter to get a treat after school. On the way home, we were listening to NPR’s replay of the morning news that described people leaving their homes in Gaza. She asked me how it is possible that she can be eating a snack while a girl in another place is leaving home because of bombing. That night, I read Kwame Dawes’ article, ‘Political Poetry,’ on the Poetry Foundation website. This is the poem that I wrote.” (web)

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August 31, 2022

“The Deluxe Edition” by Alexandra UmlasPosted by

Alexandra Umlas

THE DELUXE EDITION

This morning’s stories include a bald eagle
about to board a Southwest plane, his handler
 
taking him through the TSA checkpoint
in North Carolina, him flexing his wings, as if to say
 
look what I can do. I can fly and I can fly—
Some things still surprise us, this Eagle’s flight,
 
how delicious my breakfast tastes today, green
olives stuffed with almonds and fresh-striped
 
figs, their skins filled with August-ripeness,
and Fagles’ translation of Homer’s The Iliad open
 
to page 265, Achilles, always dying, and also always
living, speaking (again), two fates bear me on
 
to the day of death. One, a journey home
with no glory. Another, a journey away from life
 
but with everlasting glory—Oh the choices
we must make in any life! And I wonder
 
what Homer would have to say about an eagle
on a plane, the pages he might have filled today
 
with wings being winged in an aluminum miracle,
everything so different and everything the same,
 
how we still get from one place to the next
or don’t, how an eagle is even now an eagle
 
and an omen that tells us there is always something
new to see—open your wings and look—
 

—from Poets Respond
August 31, 2022

__________

Alexandra Umlas: “I’m grateful to books and to the authors of books, who show us that we are not alone in our vacillation between delight and despair—and that delight often wins! Or, if it doesn’t win, it at least surprises us into momentary joy. I found myself delighted (and perplexed) by the idea of this Eagle on a plane, who is now also on a page, which is its own kind of journey.” (web)

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April 12, 2020

“What You’ve Done” by Alexandra UmlasPosted by

Alexandra Umlas

WHAT YOU’VE DONE

That night, the clouds roll in,
as if on a whim, just at the moment
you decide to take the dog you rescued
outside to pee—and you’ve discovered
how the dog is scared of the rain,
the wind shattering the stillness
of the trees, how the dog won’t move,
not even an inch, but stands solidly,
his four legs statued to the porch.

So you carry the dog, who is
too big to be a lapdog, but small enough
to awkwardly hold, down to the corner
where the bushes are on which all
the other dogs have peed, the corner
where there’s a fire hydrant, the ultimate
dog-peeing place, and you set him down.

His name is Joey Ramone, because
your husband loves music and you already
had a cat named Beatles, like the band,
not the bug, and you and Joey Ramone
are there, on the corner of Vista del Sol
with the rain pelting you both,
and you say a prayer to the pee-gods
that the dog will find bravery
enough so you can sleep until the morning
without worrying, and you remember
your children when they were very young,
how much they needed at four
in the morning, and you remember
how your grandmother could never
get comfortable at night.

It’s late, an hour that makes the mind
panic about getting up, and the dog is also
panicked because of the rain, the rain,
that’s still shooting into your eyes,
and no amount of his furious shaking
can shake off the falling rain, and so
he runs all the way home, pulling you
behind him through the darkness, past
the masked raccoon hiding in the tree,
and you remember the man
who made the joke about who
was walking who, and you feel
as ridiculous as you look, but as if
that isn’t ridiculous enough,
when you get home you remember
the pee pads you picked up at Petco
because you didn’t know what to get—
and better to be safe than sorry.

You dig through the cupboard
to find one, set it in the garage, pull
the dog there, where it isn’t raining,
and you listen to the resolve of the rain
on the garage roof and pray (again) the dog
will just pee, and you remember something
about ammonia and decide if you spray
Windex, the dog might pee on it,
and you find the bright blue bottle, spritz
a bit on the pad, and as Joey Ramone
walks by the pad (again), you think
about My Big Fat Greek Wedding,
how Windex cures all.

The the dog sniffs curiously and still
nothing, so you think how the dog
usually pees where other dogs pee,
(except when it’s raining) and you have
no other dogs, being a one-dog household,
and you were talked into this dog
by your kids, because you are a cat person,
but your husband says something to you
one day, he says, I don’t want to live
my whole life and not know what it’s like
to have a dog, even though
he is also a cat person, and so you go
to Wags, the shelter in Westminster,
and there is Joey Ramone,
and all of a sudden he is in your car,
and you are buying pee pads
and a fifty-dollar dog bed.

Your husband loves to tell people
that the best thing about getting a dog
is not having to hear your kids ask
for a dog anymore. And it is
for all these reasons that right then
and there you pull down your sweatpants,
still damp from the rain, and you squat
and pee, just a little, just to see
if you can get the dog to go, and still
he doesn’t go, but looks at you like he
can’t believe what you’ve resorted to,
and you both go to bed,
and it’s still raining, and now
every time it rains you are reminded
of what you’ve done.

—from Poets Respond
April 12, 2020

__________

Alexandra Umlas: “Over the past few weeks, we have all found ourselves doing things we would have never imagined doing before. Also, it’s been raining a lot in Southern California this week. When I read this poem to my kids, they told me they liked it, but that I probably should’t send it anywhere. Ha!”

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January 17, 2020

“Dissection” by Alexandra UmlasPosted by

Alexandra Umlas

DISSECTION

Once on the bus ride to school the girl saw a man
smash another man’s head into the sidewalk.
The city bus kept moving down Atlantic, past
the diner where pies were stacked like beacons,
beyond metal carts bulging with water bottles,
bond businesses, billboards holding out impossible
promises, her backpack full of biology, English,
history, Spanish, math. The bell would ring,
the teachers, pacing linoleum floors, would mark
her papers with ink. The day went on like this,
except for in biology class, where the girl was given
a wrinkled, formaldehyde mink with pink skin, like
a baby but with a tail and two sharp teeth.
Nothing was soft, its insides rubbery, and she
wanted what was soft: oatmeal with cream
for breakfast, the cotton threads of a grey sweatshirt
that matched the morning sky. And they were told
to cut the yellow fat of its body open, but also
to respect the mink, its worm esophagus, threaded
muscles, marble eyes. She took the bus
home at 2:40 p.m., remembering the man framed
in the window, the silent switching back and forth
of skull, sidewalk, skull, the mink wrapped in plastic,
its mouth hanging open, what tools she had laid out
on the scratched table: scalpel, scissors,
hands, what is cut away and what remains. The girl
closed her eyes, pushed herself against the bus’s
exo-skeleton, went over, again, the systems:
respiratory, circulatory, digestive, until she arrived
home, peeled all that death off her shoulders.
The girl ate dinner because what was done
was done. Nothing would bring the mink back,
and the man was okay or he wasn’t.

—from Rattle #65, Fall 2019

__________

Alexandra Umlas: “I am drawn to the way a short piece of writing, like a poem, can capture an experience. It’s as if the poet has broken off a piece of life and made it tangible. Life is vast and unruly—it is comforting, for me, to look at it in pieces. Frost called poetry a ‘momentary stay against confusion.’ I am grateful for those ‘momentary stays’ poetry offers me.” (web)

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June 10, 2018

“Remembering You, Anthony Bourdain, at the Elementary School Talent Show” by Alexandra UmlasPosted by

Alexandra Umlas

REMEMBERING YOU, ANTHONY BOURDAIN, AT THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TALENT SHOW

Most of these kids have yet to try sushi,
haven’t left the country to taste the world,
still gravitate toward boxed macaroni
and cheese, but someday they might turn
on the TV to see you eat some strange food,
and witness the uneasy thrill of trying,
trying, trying something new.
This morning, at the elementary school,
an audience gathered between construction-
papered walls and a talent show began:
a boy played clear notes from a recorder,
a girl tap-danced across the carpeted floor,
someone sang, played the piano, delivered
a comedy skit full of terrible knock-knock
jokes followed by a drum’s bada-ba,
then applause. You knew how to savor
an experience, how sitting with strangers
makes friends, that what we put in our mouths
matters—you pointed out the thread
spooled between us when we have a meal
together, the connection that takes place over
coffee or beer. This morning, after hearing
you were gone from this world, my daughter
danced on the stage, nervously taking a seat
at the table of the unknown. You would
have approved of these kids practicing
the art of taking risks. Someday
they might hear your voice and give up
using jarred garlic or eating in restaurants
on Mondays; or maybe they will recognize
that to taste is to experience, to try
means to live, or they will think back
to this elementary school talent show,
to this morning, where in the kindergarten
classroom, the chicks chirp under a warming
light. Where, just days ago, the children pressed
their faces to the glass as the eggs began to crack,
and from the shells emerged the broken,
scattered singing of new life.

—from Poets Respond
June 10, 2018

__________

Alexandra Umlas: “Friday morning, the morning we all found out Anthony Bourdain was dead at 61, I attended the talent show at my daughter’s elementary school. I watched the kids with a mixture of sadness and joy—remembering Bourdain’s wonderful curiosity. He had the kind of excitement for life that kids naturally have and that we often lose as adults.” (web)

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November 28, 2017

“Touring the B-17 Bomber at the Palm Springs Air Museum” by Alexandra UmlasPosted by

Alexandra Umlas

TOURING THE B-17 BOMBER AT THE PALM SPRINGS AIR MUSEUM

a golden shovel after Randall Jarrell

They climb a slender ladder. From
stitched-together metal, my
daughters disappear into the plane, a mother’s
intuition wanting them to sleep
longer in their not knowing. I
want to conceal how people fell
from the sky, how bombs glided into
their targets, how it happened in the
daylight, so everything hit. This State,

the state of being and of war. And
when they go further into the fortress, I
can no longer hear their hunched
tunneling. No oxygen masks needed in
this controlled air museum; its
planes are still. We are in the belly
of the third hanger, learning till
we are sick with statistics. My
eyes want to look away, wet
with sadness, with the soft fur
of faces that burned or froze.

My girls sit in the jump seats. Six
feet from ground, not miles
like the eight to ten men from
the past who flew this earth
in these planes, men loosed
into war, one man who crawled from
somewhere in this turret, from its
curved surface, with the dream
of getting home, with the want of
oxygen, and warmth and life,

someone’s son, someone’s, I
know this from Jarrell, how a man woke
into death. How am I to
explain these images of black
smoke trailing, or the definition of flak
or anti-anything? My girls and
their enthusiastic guide pause at the
plane’s plexiglass womb. Its nightmare
nested only the smallest fighters.

A single man curled knee to chin. When
my children emerge intact, I
hear the guide state how many died
but later, the girls tell me they
loved the plane, over washed
hair and brushed teeth, tell me
how some men were thrown out
because of their wounds, of
how their friends deployed the
parachutes, about the turret
and its smallness, tell me with
smiles, still unaware of what remains: a
poem, a person, a mess, a hose.

—from Poets Respond
November 28, 2017

__________

Alexandra Umlas: “This weekend we toured a B-17 bomber at the Palm Springs Air Museum. My children took the tour with a guide, who walked them through the plane. I waited outside, staring at the Ball Turret of the plane. The idea of war has been in the news a lot lately, but the idea of war is different than the reality of war. I never paid too much attention to the poem ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’ (the entirety of the poem makes up the last word in each line) until today, when confronted with an actual Ball Turret and imagining a real person curled up inside. I hope my kids never know the reality of war. I hope war stays only as an idea—something abstract—part of our history. This is my attempt at a “Golden Shovel” poem that digs even though it doesn’t want to dig and tries to remember even the things I don’t want to remember.” (web)

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