Fin De Si?cle
Trudell, Dennis
Poem Fin De Si?cle There were twenty-three people at the movie theater and all of them were dead. One of the soldiers, a sergeant, thought it would be amusing to switch on the projector. Now...
...some mouths open, some heads shattered...
...Blood everywhere: on flesh and clothes, shoes, hair, rings, candy, spilled drink, aisle slope and dust under seats, on walls...
...It was a film from the United States...
...two women gripping hands, two old women severed at the waist by weapons on full automatic...
...The man on the screen removed his shirt, his near-smile was twenty-three inches wide...
...and yet this theater was on another continent-with no automation changing reels...
...The actress spoke the film's title...
...The soldiers had come without warning...
...On the screen a man and woman kissed: in the center aisle a hand jerked this long after death, then was still...
...So now as this first reel ended, the screen images vanished without The End, no end-credits or music...
...He edited "Full Court: Stories & Poems for Hoop Fans...
...as boot-prints of the soldiers, turning, moving back to the lobby...
...Blood had stopped moving...
...The face would smile, grimace, speak...
...Blood upon them and seats glowed dimly...
...Dennis Trudell Dennis Trudell's "Fragments in Us" was published by the University of Wisconsin Press...
...There was simply raw light, and twenty-three corpses edged by it...
...Rwanda or Chiapas, Bosnia . . . Sri Lanka, East Timor, Colombia or Kosovo or Sierra Leone, Chechnya . . . The man there on screen got his T-shirt entangled with head and arms in trying to remove it, because the film was a comedy...
...Now humans still moved in two dimensions, in Technicolor...
...And the people it faced were all dead...
...A fartlike sound rose briefly from where most people in the long, dim room lay slumped across seat-backs and armrests, across one another -some adults on top of children they tried to protect...
...His recent chapbook of movie poems, "Marquees of Buffalo," is from Parallel Press...
...reveal doubt or lust, anger, curiosity...
...often their faces became huge, occasionally a single mouth and nose, pair of eyes, nearly filling the screen...
Vol. 68 • May 2004 • No. 5
