Allen Appel

News Hour

by Allan Appel

Tell me more about this news hour

These sixty minutes that rivet your eyes

That I would want to look my way.

Another exploded car

The death of thousands

From flood, famine, disease.

These you loved more than me?

Embarrassed, I kept silent for years

Then one night, as the wine glasses

Finally began to tremble in our hands

I mustered the guilty courage:

Has the power of your gaze

Knitted those body parts together yet?

Flattened those poor bloated stomachs?

Driven away flies from the babies’ mouths?

Yet its absence has killed me this very night.

Then die, you said, without looking

Away from the screen and the flame.

Die right here, beside me.

This chair is comfortable

The night is long, the bottle is full

And there will be much news

To ponder before morning.

The True Miss Universe Contest

by Allan Appel

What if Miss Holland were not a stroopwafel

Miss Belize not a jaguar trailing jungle vegetation

Or Miss Ukraine not an archangel with sixteen-foot wings

And Miss USA not a glittery moon landing

What if they were physicists, beautiful Ph.Ds all

Modeling their latest research finds,

Miss Holland as a parallel universe

Would appear as a slice in the loaf of Time

Miss Belize in an intensely dark leotard

And flaming wings define her expertise in black holes

Miss Ukraine, a top mind in star formation,

Struts her dazzling stellar stuff

And Miss USA, the pride of M.I.T.’s anti-gravity dept.

Enters walking entirely on her hands,

The stilettos high above are antennae

Aimed into limitless space symbolizing

The never-ending search for extra-terrestrial life

We are likely not alone, but perhaps we should be.

Allan Appel is a long-time novelist, with about nine published including a National Jewish Book Award finalist way back when and a Barnes and Noble Disvover Great New Writers awardee, High Holiday Sutra (Coffee House Press, 2001). However, he began as a poet years before. When the pandemic struck the editor at the newspaper where he’s worked for twenty years, The New Haven Independent, anointed me their “pandemic poet,” with a mandate to chuck out one poem a week to capture the pandemic experience or some such or whatever else popped into mind. Some of the poems appearing here in Yellow Mama emerged from that experience.