3 Poems
Line gone dead
Sat in a corner
the day after it went dead.
That phone belonged in a museum
I thought,
having glued a magazine illustration
an antique earpiece and mike
on the rotary disk
to cover the decade and dinginess
a defunct number.
Like a nostalgia-overloaded old flame
wanting to tear it from the jack
in a non-contact sport
I came to hate the telephone
and wondered if Alexander Graham Bell
anticipated Celtic insults soaring over backyards
at the speed of anger.
He could “cause his own hair
to stand on end. It is in him,”
wrote a woman journalist
he distrusted.
Then he threw up his hands in court
sickened at the patent claims
of slanderous strangers thick
as telemarketers.
I tossed my museumpiece
of a woman speaking her mind
without being beaten
into the garbage can the obsolete earlobe
and stair-slope design. As it hit bottom,
it rang!
