Two Poems by Emma Hyche
Precarity
My friend said
that adjunct teaching makes him wonder
which character from Apocalypse Now
he is that day-
Dennis Hopper maybe, or
that Playmate emerging from the helicopter
and shimmying. The one
with the cowboy hat and the fake
guns under the swingblade. I’m
a palm tree on the beach
most days, keeping
the sand anchored
to the shore. My precarity
is distinct from his—mine silver-spangled
and christened with glitter. Risk
feels like going underwater
when it doesn’t feel
like dying yet.
And now
we’re here. I turn the poem
upside down to hear the jangle
of money inside it—your job is
to get it out. When I pull my feet
out of thick wool socks
in lieu of heat their ghosts
remain for one full minute
before collapsing. Don’t remember
how the movie ends, but I know
it involves greasepaint
and sweat. A symbol walking
into the sunset
on his way to die.
Poem for Hollywood
(After Clark Coolidge)
(After Clark Coolidge)
And if there is to be a city, let it be
ringing and ringed by asphalt
and water and may I mourn
its absence, a sprawl-one I catch
when the scrim slides up, second eyelid
of the city that could be and have been
but for the earth’s slow crumble.
I am what the movies have made
me: Celluloid-swathed,
bepixelated for the sideswipe
glance and the billboard shimmer—
I cloak myself in nonexistent stars.
A cut in the film appearing
as skin to me, and you could be
forgiven for thinking that
there is nothing in the movies
but what is not here. A thumb
strokes a cheek absent of flesh.
A dress cloaks a body absent
of bones. I could disappear
to canyon drive and white
wash, a shark tooth and a rip
tide brimming with nothing. I will cry
when the sea eats Los Angeles. Then
I’ll watch a movie about it.
On the screen waves caress the canyons
dotted with no houses at all.
*
Emma Hyche is a poet and essayist currently based in Denver, Colorado. A winner of the 2016 AWP Intro Journals Prize and a recent MFA graduate, her work appears in Apartment, Timber, Dreginald, Entropy, and elsewhere.
