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.
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.
