Michael Kriesel
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Over the Rainbow
Aeons of apes get stomach aches because
black-and-white sight can’t see ripeness. The sky
changes gradually. Primate eyes coax
dull gray into light blue. First to see how
Eden’s apples blushed like flesh, ape-girl Eve
fed all of us from God’s green grove. Can you
guess who saw the first pale rainbow? A rust-
honey monkey named Dorothy. Ancients,
in their mosaics, lacked purple. They were
just unable to see it. An opaque
kaleidoscope with gaps, our vision’s map
lags behind birds, bees, fish, rats. Half the zoo
moves through an ultraviolet realm un-
known except by UV lens or a storm
on the way: lime clouds, blood grass, gray hail. Hell
posing for its pink-lit portrait. A crack
quivers in the window. A dazed bluejay
reverts to gray. Colors bleed from my eyes,
stick to my cheeks like rainbow syrup. Bosch
triptych landscape minus sinners. A gong
undulates. Stars shift across a red gulf.
Evolution revokes rainbows from some
white males, 8% of them color blind.
Xanthic, now, the Golden Age. Myopic,
yawning, I water the lawn, the rhubarb.
Oz fades. My hose’s rainbow dims, goes gray.
Superboy Robots
Like a blob or the Borg, I absorb my
girlfriend’s memories of playing Barbie,
then extract a few lives from her cat, Mr. Biggles.
Sunday’s a buffet of faces at the grocery store.
Fixing on a person, place or thing, I suck its soul
out through its nose, like some nostril Nosferatu.
Red squirrels mummify, become dried apples.
Lawns leach white. I visualize time as transparent
sand, and throw handfuls of it at things
to get them where they’re going faster.
Certain people don’t age well around me.
I’m the child in Whitman’s poem, assimilating
lilacs, riverbanks…gulping down the dawn,
becoming something larger than myself.
Here’s what really happened: I joined the navy.
Slept with men and women. Drank like a fish.
Smoked like a dragon. Swore like a parrot.
Got divorced and married. Helped raise
a girlfriend’s daughter for a couple years—
then left. Celibate as a tree, I live alone,
writing and chanting and lifting, my higher
self descending to inhabit me like Clark Kent
in math class, who can’t always save us,
so he has a closet of Superboy robots.
They extinguish fires and foil bank robbers
while the real boy of steel’s stuck in school
or busy banging Lois Lane, or too hung over to fly.
My closet door rattles some nights, but it’s locked.
"Over the Rainbow" first published in North American Review
"Superboy Robots" first published in Antioch Review
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President of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, Michael Kriesel, 52, is a poet and reviewer whose work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly, Antioch Review, Crab Creek Review, Rattle, Small Press Review, Library Journal, Nimrod, North American Review, Rosebud, and The Progressive. He served on the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission 2006-2008 and was the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Conference Coordinator 2006-2012. He’s won the 2012 Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Triad Award, the 2011 Wisconsin People & Ideas Poetry Contest, the 2009 Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Muse Prize, and the 2004 Lorine Niedecker Poetry Prize from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. He was featured poet for the 2010 Great Lakes Writers Festival. Books include Chasing Saturday Night: Poems about Rural Wisconsin (Marsh River Editions), Whale of Stars (haiku) (Sunnyoutside), Moths Mail the House (Sunnyoutside), and Feeding My Heart to the Wind: Selected Short Poems (Sunnyoutside). He has a B.S. in Literature from the University of the State of New York, and was a print and broadcast journalist in the U.S. Navy 1980-1990. He’s currently a janitor at the rural elementary school he once attended.