Elly Bookman

CODE RED

While schoolchildren slip
like stolen hours into the corners
of the room, I turn
the half-disc of the lock
from horizon to high noon
then flip the little lever
of the light switch and like this
we have followed instructions,
we have done what we can.
The weather will be
what it is—several minutes
of sunshine or clouds,
maybe the kind of mist
you only know is falling
if you see it against gray road
or thick trees—inevitable,
exact result of every
wind, pressure, and breath
of earth’s whole history
here rendered.
In darkness,
I remember the day
a heavy volume of landscapes
by Hitler came into the used
bookstore where my job
was to tenderly wipe down
the covers, then wrap the jackets
in clear plastic. Inside
were Austrian countrysides
and town squares, alpine
villas and lakes as clear as
emptiness. A man
saw the world and sought ways
to make it look more like
how it feels to be lonely.
I remember this
now, now my job is to wait
for the noises to be
what they are, for the smells
and textures, the colors
of the air, of
the walls and floors.

ELLY BOOKMAN has published poems in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. She was the recipient of the first annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from APR and the 2017 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from The Georgia Review. She writes and teaches in her hometown of Atlanta, Georgia.