New Poetry from Matt Armstrong: “Covid Night”

Paris sirens
Pewter sky
The white lace
Of a dogwood bough
At midnight

Reach up
Clutch and huff
Hungry before bed
For the sweetness
Of a rose

But a dogwood
Is a dogwood
And there’s no escaping
The sentence
For the world:

The old blacks
And the new poor
Must die
From the bugs
At the grocery store

Drones police the distance
Between
New Yorkers
Robots shout from spring sky:
Stay away

While sanctions
Strangle Caracas children
Bleed Persian women
And a million singers scream
To the people of the screen

A poet in Madrid
Sits under house arrest
Another in Algiers
Might as well
Be in Madrid

And what do I mean by
Paris sirens
Beyond the sad
Pin pon wail
That cries arretez

I mean a rhythmic wigwag
Just a bit more rounded
Now our own martial horn
But Greensboro, Nazareth,
Athens, Melbourne

It’s all the same sentence tonight:

No more fingertip touches
From the beached weaver
No more whispered breath
From the one making masks
For the world

Just this:

The unyielding petals
Of a midnight limb
As the strange siren hunts
For those with a touch
Of needing too much