"Responsorials" by Joe Weil and Emily Vogel (Pt.2)

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Sing Pretty Shoes!

The Pretty Shoes are singing songs by Faure.They are singing sad but tasteful and understated songs,

the sort of tunes that appeal to intelligent circumspect women withadvanced degrees played by the older Sissy Spacek.

They are singing deep into the deathof mountains—the fractured stones of shale.

All the white people who have something to protecthear the pretty shoes and donate.

The black people are living wherever the white peoplefailed—or rather, where the wrong white people succeeded.

"You are the right kind of white person," the pretty shoes assure."You are the white person who stars in films highly praised by critics."

The white people are consoled. They go to restaurantsto taste food that isn't white under very white conditions.

They go to rivers and commit acts of yoga.Yoga is all over the fractured hills of shale. There's yoga in them thar hills!

A statue to Kali, the great destroyer rises, but she has beenco-opted by peace-keeping missions in the middle east.

What will we do with all the benvolent white women who starin southern novels about heroic white women who stand up against

Jim Crow? They are everywhere! One wonders how the southbecame so racist considering all the benevolent white women.

They are all Sissy Spacek with a savvy Kathy Bates to playInkadoo. Raise the dead! Raise the dead! Cry the pretty shoes.

It is part of the finale of seem. Everyone seems benevolent. If the deadrise, how will they speak of the hell we have created?

In the hills, green children try to save the waters, but hate the nativeswho need jobs, who need commerce, who need some sort of con.

It is all safe for the pretty green children. When they fail, they will fleeback to Long Island, back to Westchester, back to the ethnic restaurants

where you eat rare flowers from the north sides of Mountains.But the poor—where will they flee except to their anger

which, if it could be peeled, a thousand layers down to the shale,would prove the origin of all song?

Sing Pretty Shoes! Sing for the poor and for the rich. Singfor the Parrot who is running for a second term of office!

Sing for the photogenic trees, sing for the gas fires burning within us.Sing! Sing! Sing! Sing! Pretty shoes.

While The Dreamer Dreamt and Then Was Not Dreaming

They weren't dead, but in the dream they were dead, like bygones with evil faces. It wasn't fair to them to be represented so demonically. But regardless, the dreamer dreamt of them, and dreamt also of great and virtutuous women who fell from bridges and birthed pre-term children in the darkness. A lot of people were watching this. There were guns involved, like intricate sports. There was the fear of guns and there was the abundance of guns. The air reflected the sea and the sea reflected the air and the dream was inside of the mind which reflected the air and the sea. Outside the window, a bicycle passed, buzzing like a hoard of very strange insects. Suddenly the dreamer was not dreaming. The dreamer was clicking on a lamp which had been placed on a desk. The dreamer clicked the lamp on and off, off and on again. Outside, a truck passed, roaring like a city. Time was the ghosts of distant and delighted children screaming. Time was upon us like a mission, but it moved like a fish. There was no such thing as “necessary.” The fruit that was offered was lush and delicious. Of course, there was trauma, but it was eloquent as storms of very small petals from distinct flowers in the summer, in the filthy and delirious summer.

Emily and Joe live in upstate New York with their children Clare and Gabriel. “Responsorials” are excerpted from their collaborative book of poetry West of Home (Blast Press, 2013).