Where Have You Gone?

In “Livelong Day,” Angela Leighton’s description brings a father’s watch to life. The device has “three thin hands”; it’s a “light-tongued creature, touch-ing, touch-ing,” offering “the whisper of a tick.” It’s less machine than animal.

Sixty years ago, the speaker says, “I laid my child’s ear / closer to hear / what I could not read.” Now an adult, she echoes that action: “finding it silent in a drawer, / I bend my ear / and wind the tiny tractor wheel / to hear it still.” Yet even as she revives the watch, she can’t work the same magic on the object’s owner, whose “wasted wrist” has “raced to its ending.” Accordingly, listening to the watch’s “tick” doesn’t merely provide a comforting reminder of her father. It also recalls the ravages of time, the “doomsday drummer” who sets our pace.

 

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Like a newspaper article, Victoria Chang’s “OBIT” stretches down the page in a narrow column. In all other senses, the poem makes for unusual journalism—it memorializes not just the speaker’s mother, but also her mother’s teeth. They “died twice”: her natural teeth when a dentist extracted them, and her fake teeth when she herself passed away. After the latter event, “I shoved the teeth into my mouth,” Chang writes. “But having two sets of teeth only made me hungrier.” Fair enough: we eat with teeth; we tend not to eat the teeth themselves.

What kind of nourishment does the speaker yearn for? After discovering her late mother’s words “in a ring around my mouth, like powder from a donut,” she wonders “what her last thought was.” She hungers for her mother’s words—yet even with the other woman’s teeth in her mouth, she can voice only her own.

 

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“Like a beer bottle thrown into the river by a boy too drunk to cry,” writes Martín Espada, “like the shard of a Styrofoam cup drained of coffee brown as the river, / like the plank of a fishing boat broken in half by the river, the dead float.” He delays the subject of the sentence until the end of the third line, keeping us wondering what—or, as it turns out, who—he’s describing.

This lag is telling. Espada’s poem, “Floaters,” explores the resonance of that term, which border patrol officers apply to migrants who drown while trying to cross the river from Mexico to Texas. The euphemistic expression obscures the dreadful reality of the refugees’ situation. With his long, dilatory first sentence, Espada both echoes and rejects this obfuscation; he lands firmly on “the dead.” Throughout the poem, he continues to stress the humanity and individuality of the deceased, reiterating the names of two real-life victims: 25-year-old Óscar and his young daughter, Valeria.

Espada concludes by envisioning the ultimate act of migration. When “the men / who speak of floaters” get to heaven, he writes, may the gate shut “on their babble-tongued faces.”

 

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In “Coalition Partner,” Kevin Craft describes an unexpected sighting of the Chancellor of Germany. “Someone spotted Angela Merkel. Hey look, they said. And a crowd formed.” He describes the setting as a “refugee dream”—a nod both to Merkel’s migrant-friendly politics and to the poem’s fantastical tone. The speaker wants to snap a photo of the occasion, but his phone won’t cooperate. So he starts following Merkel “at a polite distance,” all the way to her house. He gets followed, too, in various senses. “Cold sunlight tracked me down the moving sidewalk,” and when he manages to capture Merkel in a shot, a stranger shoots him (with a water pistol).

Ultimately he discovers that his photographs do not, in fact, feature the Chancellor: reviewing the images, he finds “no Angela Merkel. She was nowhere to be seen.” The poem’s final question expresses the emotion that drives the speaker’s behavior throughout. “Oh Angela, where have you gone?”