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News and Sundries
The only news is war; the slower
quiet dying in the street
goes on without saying among
the campus maps and racks
of chewing gum and sweets.
Iraq again. And Bosnia.
The grocery store, the elegant
small shops, shut down. This town
is going out of business, women
with their sons in slings,
frycooks, berry pickers
and men who shoveled snow
for room and board--
some leak has sprung in the vessel
they drank from. The money
runs out and away,
and with it greetings
in the check-out line,
coffee dark with anonymous
banter, the hands that lightly touch
when coins are passed. Corinna
camps in the alley behind
the News and the radical bookstore,
and who doesn't dodge by now her eye
and audience? Her story
is full of they, and her voice spirals upward:
the Missing Persons Bureau wouldn't,
cops couldn't, doctors dog her but she's free
to cover over and over her beat
up to the bakery, down as far
as Asia and Bonducci's for the lunch trade.
She windowshops the couples. Never
accosts, but waits, as if for her usual
table, as if she might slip back
into the fast rip of their conversation
having missed nothing, as if no time had passed.
Wendy Battin is the author of In the Solar Wind (The National Poetry Series/Doubleday 1984) and of the forthcoming Little Apocalypse. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Yale Review, The Nation, Iowa Review, Threepenny Review, and many other magazines and anthologies. She's had fellowships from the NEA, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and has taught at Smith College, Syracuse University, and Boston University. She will be visiting poet at Connecticut College this fall and at MIT in the spring.