After Move 37
1
The guests had come to escape troubles that didn’t
look like their own husbands and brothers,
their dogs, their dishes. The war happens far away,
where snow falls with knife-edged shrapnel.
Maybe they’ve seen the news. Maybe not.
. . . in the interview, the witness catches
her breath staring at the landscape and all
the space Chadds Ford can hide. I leave
the veranda to go inside. I’m watching
a re-run of Ancient Aliens and want to believe
we are benevolent beings. Our Skywalker, our
Leia and Obi-Wan have fought our battles
in a galaxy far away from Chadds Ford,
far from the hillsides that hang like artwork.
2
Russian missiles strike the ashes of Chornobyl
long after the power goes out. Even the artist
in his studio remains the unfortunate nobody
with nothing to say. If the news is fake, plenty is
left to praise along roadsides lined with refugees
leaving town. They take nothing but a husband’s
smile, a mother’s hug. They walk away, each
in a different rush. Where they go, no one knows,
not even the aftermath, pregnant with its hush
creeping beneath the unspoken shadows.
3
Numbed by running, the man’s daughter sees
the house on fire. Her husband, the mechanic,
leaves the dishes, photographs, and the sweater
hand-knit by a grand-aunt. Books and letters,
the Bible citing marriages and births, quilts,
the hall clock, the china thrown to the floor.
4
The silence breaks—15 minutes ago, a campus alert.
The witness said dark-skinned, said a gun or a knife.
said the light was bad. Said he acted alone. Said
the light made him stumble. The witness said
nothing else, except herself hunkered in a hallway
trying to hide. Said the knife flashed red under
an exit sign as if a god had pointed to the way
out. Said the world within a world listened
for footsteps. Said the Internet, said footsteps
clicked as if browsing. Said Facebook. Said TikTok—
said it was a distraction from the Crime Alert,
said YouTube. Said puppies, said kittens. Said
the clicking down the hallway got closer…
5
The guests write a review for the AirBnB
on its website. They describe their view
from the veranda over the lake. They write
about the cozy wicker chairs, the awning
overhang, over which hangs a branch
for a heron to perch. It’s early March,
and a robin in the ginkgo tweets its song
into the lake’s algae bloom. All the inedible
fish look up at the heron’s blue wings that are
readied for flight. In time, the bird will arch
from his perch, awakening a rash of ripples.
But for now, the guests have nothing more to write.
They bundle their baggage into their Volvo
and start their 6-hour drive back home.
6
The happy ending of that story, if ever, is years away.
The AirBnB recedes into a memory of Keuka’s
manicured vineyards, as if painted by Wyeth or
one of his sons. Rolling hills and stone-walled
lanes paint the road. The guests, a gay couple
newly married by a law, also suddenly new.
My mother used to say Ain’t young love grand?
but I wonder what she’d say of the newlyweds,
of the two middle-aged men in their reverie
exploring dark places. I rub my eyes to erase
some unspoken embarrassment. Said Snap out of it.
I almost say it aloud as if someone from another
world let out a cry from so far inside me that
my voice rushed up from another body—as if
from a fairytale where brambles wreck the castle.
“Move 37” refers to the second game of the historic Go match between Lee Sedol, a world champion Go player, and AlphaGo, an AI developed by Google DeepMind, in which AlphaGo made a highly unconventional and surprising move on the 37th turn. This move, later dubbed “Move 37,” was considered a brilliant and creative play that no human player would have thought of making.
Room on the 7th Floor
Well shit, of course, men will
flee with Trojans in their backpacks.
Of course, drapes will smell
of whiskey. She’s heard the stories
of claws & cats & epochs
belonging to cats, claws
ripping at a dress.
She’s been here before.
After she hauled her bags
to the seventh floor,
after the drapes lulled her
into the midnight clawing
through the window,
& she’s where she once was,
drawing a traverse rod.
She lays her cash down
on the table as the dealer calls
Place your bets. & she remembers
the man vanishing
back into his game.
Yes. That man. That night—
but not this night.
Megalomaniac’s Déjà-vu
Haven’t we been here before—Just look how little
has changed since God had his big date with that girl,
the night he got her pregnant, without foreplay,
without a condom, without asking—no dinner, no movie—
then leaving her without alimony and only a mangy
worn-out ass to ride overnight into a backwoods town
where no one knew her, and she slept in the barn smelling
of goats and donkey shit. He came down on her
like a big shot grabbing her by the pussy, immaculately,
and got away with it. He was famous and she let him do it.
Just look how little has changed: “My Body, My Choice.”
A tipping point, ready to tip, needs more revenge,
maybe half a million pink hats on The Mall—pink
placards, pink banners—shouting into the PA box
where a man who would be God, could be thinking
a bitch is just a bitch. He wants to decree an orange
embryonic, gold-plated bastard will be carried to term.
What Passes for Talent
—for Paul
When Jane called to say you had died,
I thought about the conversations we had
on the phone. That time we talked about
the Chinaman found on a raft off Brazil—
The fishermen who found him had stories:
One said he believed what he saw:
93 pounds of the man cooked to a blister.
Another said the stench was foul.
The third tasted only salt from the ocean.
They argued about what kept him alive.
Was it sugar cubes & lures he twisted from hemp?
Had he been inventing gods and praying to them?
You were convinced that he dreamed
of standing at the door of a lover
who played the piano—
something by Mozart—sweetly.
Robert Haynes lives in Seneca Falls, New York. His poems have appeared in North American Review, Nimrod, New Letters, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, Bellingham Review, Lake Effect, Poet Lore, Cimarron Review, Natural Bridge, Louisville Review, and Louisiana Literature, as well as on the Verse Daily website. Poems have also been reprinted in the anthologies Cabin Fever (Word Words) and Kansas City Out Loud (BkMk Press), and in the poetry textbook Important Words (Boynton/Cook Heinemann). His latest book is The Grand Unified Theory (Paladin Contemporaries). He currently teaches online writing and visual rhetoric and poetry workshops at Arizona State University.
