Maureen Seaton

Unsolvable

                                                   Hey kids, plug into the faithless

                                                   Maybe they're blinded

                                                   But Bennie makes them ageless

                                                   We shall survive, let us take ourselves along
                                                                 —Elton John & Bernie Taupin, "Bennie and the Jets"

I might be getting your funeral mixed up with Mom’s, when an old stalker
of Zoe’s came to the cemetery and we told him to leave and he did. No
drama, although we were prepared, in our grief, to kill him.
 
Not everything I say from now on will be true, but that is. I can’t
remember taking you to the cemetery in your green coffin, but I know Zoe
wasn’t there this time. You’d fucked up once too often, she said,
 
and off she went. Remember when I asked you if I could sit next to you
and you checked out the chair that was occupied by one of your
hallucinations? "Well, you COULD," you said, like a prizefighter
 
who'd been hit in the head too many times but hadn't lost his ability
to make a fist. Without an autopsy, the facts are blurred and sloppy,
monstrous or c'est la vie. Some days this matters. Others,                   
 
you’re at ease behind the wheel of a yellow Pontiac convertible. Now
you sit beside me and say, "Hey, kid." I think it was the end of all music
that killed you, the din of departure, that solid wall of sound, dissolving.

Dune Buggy


Two French sisters die

on South Beach. One is napping,
one is reading Proust.

Bildungsroman


Chapter 1:        Lucie went off to a dance in Connecticut where she met a boy who could
                          slow it down just right. Lucie was boy-inspired.
 
Chapter 2:        More! she thought and went on meeting boys of different heights, hues,
                          and dancing abilities, from New York and Connecticut, from Massachusetts and Vermont.
 
Chapter 3:        Once from Jersey.
 
Chapter 4:        Boys, she thought: fun but fidgety, graceful but slow on the uptake.
 
Chapter 5:        Lucie didn’t give the two co-eds with rumors flying around their heads
                          like sandflies, who remained nameless except for the name the other girls
                          coughed into their hands, a second glance.
 
Chapter 6:        Why would I, she thought, appearing in her dancing shoes at the Ship
                          Ahoy, the Barge, the Straw Hat, the Buckboard Inn.
 
Chapter 7:        She was just seventeen. (You know what I mean.)
 
Chapter 8:        Her options were as narrow as Scarlett O’Hara’s waist, although some
                          form of discontent was already brewing below the belt.
 
Chapter 9:        Thought Lucie: It will be years before I begin my search for meaningful
                          existence within an unbending society.
 
Chapter 10:      What a long, arduous, and gradual journey! (She almost thought.)
 
Chapter 11:      Then she kissed the girl who had traveled all the way from Brooklyn to
                          take her for a ride on her motorcycle.
 
Chapter 12:      The dim values of the social order failed to manifest in Lucie and she  
                          stood unaccommodated into such a silly, prehistoric, gender-bland society.
 
Chapter 13:      The Beginning.
 


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Maureen Seaton has authored numerous poetry collections, both solo and collaborative— most recently, Fibonacci Batman: New & Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013) Her awards include the Iowa Poetry Prize, an Illinois Arts Council Grant, e Society of Midland Authors Award, the Audre Lorde Award, the Lambda Literary Award, an NEA fellowship, and the Pushcart Prize. She is Professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of Miami.