Ken Meisel

Arbus would later insist, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. –Geoff Dyer, The Ongoing Moment

SCENES FROM AN ONGOING MOMENT

What makes them give up, these half-dead
bums, all laying around like dirty turnips.

A 1958 Ford, morbid, Sun Gold and Raven Black.
Its deep grill, so obscene and premonitory

and open mouthed; those quad head lights–
and a scalloped rear end; and four oval taillights.

And, parked beside it, a two-door 1958 Olds 88,
Pearl Gray, its gaping mouth, mischievous, taunting,

and its namesake, lettered in metal right there
above the chrome grill. On the theater marquee:

The Seventh Seal, that film by Ingmar Bergman,
death wheelbarrowing itself here, to play chess.

Chess? Can you imagine it? Forms, created
as conventional shapes, these men, these cars,

and death, playing a game of chess? And then, later–
in 1969, Charley Manson, drilling down

on that loud Beatles song, Helter Skelter,
riffing it on his hack guitar as he schemed

a violent revolution against the blacks, the rich.
Intervals of naïveté and neglect, those girls

that killed for him. Mike Love, worried
he’d adopt Don't Worry Baby as a cruising

song as they barreled up into the hills–
to mark their murder victims. And then–

in 1995, O.J., in that white Ford Bronco.
America’s image of a chase, on four wheels.

What’s in the chase, hidden? It’s the familiar:
death, playing chess. More acute, for the camera.


Ken reads "Scenes from an Ongoing Moment":



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Ken confesses: "This poem juxtaposes cars, cinema and song with death as it plays chess with us. The poem aims to underscore the odd, arbitrary if tragic happenstance that can be so prevalent in the course of life. Further: it highlights cinema and social media as complicit in the longstanding and prevailing, vulgarized voyeur culture. The poem emphasizes that performance—in extremis for the camera—is now the standard fare in vogue."

KEN MEISEL has work in San Pedro River Review and Rattle. His most recent book is Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018).

Ken Meisel

1956 PACKARD (NEBRASKA)

From nauseous storm clouds and ill hallucination,
from crass matter-of-fact violence and perversity,

and from whatever psychic piece of the world
we can never quite repudiate, nor ever finally choose

the exact right photograph to best construe it,
come Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate

in a stolen 1956 Packard – too large for them
to drive: its black-crow color and hooded headlamps

recessive, and suspiciously gazing out from the front
fenders, and its blood red taillights, set deep inside

those conservative fins. It was too difficult to drive –
with the police in pursuit – a rich man’s car. They stabbed

the owner to death, and twisted the dog’s neck and filled
the Black Packard with stolen jewelry, like it was some

flagship of the wrongly-made. Now, in the dust
of the highway where beauty and regret take shape

in a restless sunflower, the crickets chirrup, and a lonesome
heathen of a bird starts singing in a dried-up cottonwood.

The sun escapes the highway and hides itself behind
a ridge of trees. Buildings become frightful, cold-hearted.

He slips the radio dial, twists it past a bible station
and a car commercial, lands on Bruce Springsteen,

Nebraska: From the town of Lincoln Nebraska,
a sawed-off .410 on my lap, through the badlands

of Wyoming, I killed everything in my path.


Ken Meisel reads "1956 Packard (Nebraska)":



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Ken confesses: "This poem directs its attention to the odd inclusionary interface of crime, automobile, and song. The aesthetic is Noir American Gothic. The car, amidst the horror of the crime, is weaponized. The Springsteen song, of course, memorializes the horrific perversity of the killing urge. The poem elicits the crime's lonely, desolate aftermath."

KEN MEISEL is a poet and psychotherapist from the Detroit area. He is a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, and winner of the Liakoura Prize. Recent books include Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018) and The Drunken Sweetheart at My Door (FutureCycle Press: 2015). He has work in Midwestern Gothic and Rattle.