Sound-Track To Kigali

Noah Leznoff
From:   Why We Go To Zoos. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 1997.

"She overcame a terrible tragedy, but she made it to the top and she intends to stay there."
         — Ted Koppel, about somebody or other

He is led to the dying
by circus star apparitions
square-dentured uncles
glitter bodies flying
from cannons, swinging from
trapezes, juggling cars & genitals & brains
  in the national fish basket
  (the exhausted working day)
juggling him to facility,
to wake up and begin again tomorrow
to come home to his living
room of decorative forgetting.
    Dig a dog a bone.

An american horror story, too, makes good
television.
  These are deaths to engage,
  deaths informed by high-
angle aesthetics,
voiced-over deaths to enlarge our
  hearts,
   these deaths made possible
by anodyne interruptions
which are) themselves
interruptions to (commericials for
fear and pity and helplessness.

The mother sobs in slow motion
the sound track weeps
the bodies lobbed into a common
      rut are covered in
   plastic or corrugation;

  the garbage bag is kick-tuff, animal
  resistant; families decompose in his
    bowl of fruit, in his sweater,
his discount fire-sale Korean shoes.

  He rewinds this news too late.
  Smoke plumes from the millinery.
  The moon rises like a logo.

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Noah Leznoff's works copyright © to the author.