David M. Alper is a high school AP English teacher in New York City, residing in Manhattan. His work has appeared in Thirty West Publishing House, In Parentheses, and elsewhere.
David Alper’s poem “Coping With The Headlines” was featured in Volume 5, Issue 4.
A Country Made of Face Masks
The pundits state
we’ve at long last started to move
from philosophical doctrine
to worthlessness.
It’s valid that stopping
is debilitating.
Like a ringer, or rather its sound opening,
a quiet that having tolled talks once more
suspended between conditions of deficiency:
a point navigating a numbered scene.
This nation of little boundless qualities is our main thing
with what remains: bits of window sheets,
refracted light, what assembles in the torn leaves
from the darkening edge of the red fields
developed dull. State what you will, the body is no more
than the moon, a white pant button in a pool
of gas, a radiance of debris and fire
rising on the stepping stone of night.
Hush
Trying not to state anything a few seconds ago,
Be that as it may, celestial attendants are around us,
In the flatware, the lines of glasses
On the rack.
I wouldn’t address them presently,
They are not prepared for us. Immaculateness has formed their sight,
What’s more, we are stunning to their eyes, best case scenario.
Told to stretch out their touch to fallen ones, they are hesitant.
Who can accuse them? They cut themselves
On the sharpness of our brains,
Also, run back dying, directly to heaven,
Who gets together their kids, ties their injuries,
Also, tunes in to their tears.
Who possesses the narratives now? Our weapons are words,
Paradise trembles at seeing our offenses.
Have we no disgrace, that we send the sparkling ones
Back to the spot they originated from,
Loaded up with detestations? There will be
A retribution, for everything is seen.
Preserved Words
When she died on 9/11, her computer was destroyed.
Work servers captured only snippets of emails,
but he went back to preserve her words,
transferred them to attachments and printed them.
Emails from when they were first dating:
corny, considerate, private communiqués
between them, setting plans for dinner
with friends or a date. He did the same
when her brother died unexpectedly too:
mini tomes of correspondence,
love letters, and he read them on occasion,
forever leaving him with a memory
he’d forgotten, a grin on his face feeling
closer, knowing she could climb any time
back into his long, unshared shadow.
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By In Parentheses in IP Volume 7
32 pages, published 1/15/2022
IP Volume 5: In Parentheses Magazine (Spring 2020-Crowds Edition)
The SPRING 2020 issue of In Parentheses Literary Magazine. Published by In Parentheses (Volume 5, Issue 3)
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