March 2007
Three Poems from The Silence of Men
By Richard Jeffrey Newman
Again
The front door opens onto the hallway
running through the apartment like a spine.
To the left, the living room, the green couch
there’s somewhere a picture of me kissing
cousin Deborah on, and the bridge table
where Grandma Ruth taught us to play Mah Jong.
Further down, the kitchen, the brown chairs,
my father and his father drinking beer,
talking the horses. Straight ahead, the door
I don’t remember ever seeing open.
He says he’s going to teach me a lesson.
He says it’s my mother’s fault. He pushes me
back into the bathroom. Then nothing but my
father sleeping. The dream ends. I’ve wet my bed.
Melissa's Story
The doctor gave instructions like a spy:
Be there, seven pm, on the dot.
If you’re not, I’m gone. Don’t even think about
another appointment. Got it? That day,
of course, there was traffic, and the money
had to be in small, old bills. You will get
in my car as if we were lovers. At the spot,
you’ll step out first. Walk when and where I say.
Make a mistake and I leave. Understood?
I did. Somehow it went without a snag,
and there I was, legs open on a bed,
with a man crouched between them like a dog.
He reached into me and scraped away the life
I’d almost made, not yet mine to give.
Bill's Story
He talked about her like she was a boat.
You just loaded the ship, son. Where the wind
takes it is out of your hands, hear? She’ll find
a port to dock in. Just be glad you got
what you wanted without getting shot.
Her parents were no better, as if I’d planned
to make her pregnant. We begged them not to send
her away. Once she was gone, they moved out.
Not long after the birth-month, her single
letter came: I named him Bill. Then they took him.
Years later, I drove to where the postmark
pointed. No one would speak to me. I still
hope, though. My son is old enough to look,
and I deserve to tell him who I am.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, a poet, essayist and translator, is the author of The Silence Of Men (CavanKerry Press, 2006), a book of his own poetry, and two books of translations from classical Persian literature, Selections from Saadi's Gulistan and Selections from Saadi's Bustan (both from Global Scholarly Publications, 2004 and 2006 respectively). He has been publishing his work since 1988, when the essay “His Sexuality; Her Reproductive Rights” appeared in Changing Men magazine. Since then, his essays and poems have appeared in Salon.com, The American Voice, The Pedestal, Circumference, Prairie Schooner, ACM, Birmingham Poetry Review and other literary journals. His work has been anthologized in Access Literature (Thomson Wadsworth, 2005) and it has been translated into Dutch. He is currently translating selections from the Shahnameh, the Persian national epic, which will also be published by Global Scholarly Publications; and he is collaborating with Professor John Moyne on a new Rumi anthology. Richard Jeffrey Newman sits on the advisory board of The Translation Project and he listed as a speaker with the New York Council for the Humanities. He is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York.
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