3 poems by Daniel Seifert

Hold for applause

“A pause in Pinter is as important as a line

[…] and a silence is some sort of crisis.”

— Director Peter Hall

You see a plane draw

a line into a building

— before the smoke

and broken seconds,

the pause calls out

‘Places everyone:

Remember where you were.’

You see a man in a streetside bar

drinking three-dollar beer and

smoking a cigarette. He has

some kind of spinal problem,

and the wait between his deep

drag in, and the exhale

is ten seconds, easy. Smell of

a ragged cough in the air. And

he can’t look up, so

the exhaled smoke collapses in his lap.

His legs are lost in fog. Lips

tight and eyes bright as if he wants,

so carefully, to make a sound of sorts.

The clean white froth of beer waiting

to be drawn in, to chase away the smoke.

You see the perfect way

to end a fight. A line

that will make a loved one’s face

crumple and go slack. Then the beat

of silence in the air—that’s something

you can’t return. The doors

have shut. Something is traveling away

on dumbwaiter-lines.

You see what I’m saying. Please

let us be on the same page:

That there’s nothing worse

than when noise stops

and before the noise begins.

The ghost of your great grandmother wants to know if you’re okay, and you say

Clickfarms, polycrisis, dumpster fire

day on day enshittification meets

dadbod manspreading, all the time

into my paleo plans. Microplastics

in my blood are the only fish swimming

and the sky is red when it shouldn’t

be red. Unicorn CEOs keep ghosting

my generation and I feel like a snowflake

(remember what those felt like on a winter

morning, a bromide for the tongue?)

for not understanding that uberization

will kill us all. And the sky

is red when it shouldn’t be red. How

are you, Nana?

Cliché

I’ve never seen what repeats, in all bad stories

as imagery: a flock of starlings folding

in the air, spackling the horizon like a god-

shaped hole. Each bird ready to perform

their stale act (murmuration). Never ventured

far north enough to feel aurora borealis

coloring my breath. Listen: during the pandemic

I baked not one loaf of bread, stuck no holy ghost

of flour to my thumbs. In short, came through

lockdown after lockdown, unchanged. So:

I hate the cliches because

they travel by another road.

Hate the way you look

at me and make the starlings

dive and turn. Look. See what you made

me do. This was never meant to become

another crummy old love song.

_____________

Daniel Seifert's writing is published or forthcoming in The New York Times, Rattle, The Sun, and Poetry Wales. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and twice shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. He has a Masters in Creative Writing from Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore. He tweets @DanSeifwrites.