Signals Intelligence
The alley just simmers there
like the red-faced man
on the other side
who has had it up to here
his son never returned
this is the place where I played
littered shards of shatter
and fool’s gold
glittered chrystalline promise
to obscure the threat
to tender flesh
where summer steam rises
slightly acrid after rain
to amplify July
like the static of transistor
radios
that no-where zone
between two stations
stations
like the rows of houses
framing this linear playground
rooftop receptors channel signals
as if intelligence
stream blue the night
in wall-to-wall living rooms
where men Laugh-In
after the evening news
beside women in placid Aqua Net
silhouette
ice knocking
softly against their tumblers
round, round the enclosure
I used to watch
from my childhood
afraid
of the war
__________
NOTE:
Signals intelligence was falsified by the NSA to suggest that North Vietnamese PT Boats had attacked U.S. Warships in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Sylvia Cavanaugh
Originally from Pennsylvania, Sylvia Cavanaugh has an M.S. in Urban Planning. She teaches high school African and Asian cultural studies and advises break dancers and poets. She and her students are actively involved in the Sheboygan chapter of 100,000 Poets for Change. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems have appeared in An Arial Anthology, Gyroscope Review, The Journal of Creative Geography, Midwest Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Verse Wisconsin, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual: An Online Community Journal of Poetry. Her chapbook Staring Through My Eyes was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016.