[Two Poems] by Rob Roberge

Two Poems

by Rob Roberge

Plan B

1.

I should have known

from the gales of red wind

this morning that

the day would not go

according to plan.

Harrison, the driver,

had been late and the dame

was anxious and panicked

before we had even talked through

the practice run. She made suggestions

without sense and her eyes were those of

the hunted. Not even whiskey can cure

that kind of fear. I went forward with the thing

because

the plan was in place, the deck had been cut

& the cards dealt. Bad hand or not, time to play.

The front end of the job went off like life was

full of Saturdays and the dame calmed down

once she saw the bank manager

could be taken. She wiggled it and blinked

her lashes and the old boy nearly

walked her into the vault himself

before I opened him up. The clerks huddled

in the corner like freight while the cash was put in

the bags and the bags in the trunk

and Harrison floored it

but none of us saw the traffic cop

and he clipped Harrison in the shoulder and the chest

and blood burst onto the driver’s window

like the flick from a painter’s brush.

I smiled then at the red wind and

the truth of it all and Harrison ran the cop

over like pedestrians were points.

But they’d taken a round.

2.

We made it to the boonies, an old mountain town

near Arrowhead

on roads narrower than the thinking there.

All God’s country and gunrack envy.

The drive up the mountain had been

like crawling up a banister with your tongue.

I had taken every precaution in the sled and Harrison

lay in the backseat bleeding like

that was the thing to do. The dame, Fay,

had broken with the turns and started shouting at me,

SO, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU GONNA DO NOW?

A HELLUVA LOT OF PEOPLE SAW US RUN OVER THAT COP

AND OUR DRIVER IS BLEEDING LIKE A STUCK PIG

IN THE BACKSEAT! BETCHA DIDN’T THINK ABOUT A

PLAN B, DIDJA, SMART GUY! It carried

on like that until she started crying and that’s the thing

about birds

they gotta let the dam burst and then it’s over.

Sometimes.

She looked out the window and said,

They’re gonna come after us

in a whisper

and I said, Look Fay, we just cleared 95 grand in 10 minutes

and blew a good samaritan’s head off at the shoulders

the gods tattoo your soul

for that. There’s no getting around it.

I looked in the back and Harrison was vomiting

blood and crying and it had all gone

to hell for him. I parked the Merc in

a meadow of knee-high grass

and carried the man into the cabin and

shot him there. Once,

through the eye,

and left him on the bed.

3.

Fay was in the shower

and I covered Harrison’s head with a pillow

and poured myself a tall one

with the bottle of bourbon I had stashed

in the cupboard last spring when

Fay bought the place, all the paperwork

in her name.

I drained the glass and poured another

and repeated myself.

I went out to the Merc and tossed the bottle

on the seat and changed

the California plates with the Utah signs

I lifted a year earlier and

soaped down the windows but the smell

of vomit and blood sat there

like a mother-in-law in a babyseat.

Impossible to ignore.

Then

it began raining because

nothing can ever be easy.

I walked into the cabin and she

nearly nude in the living room

all torpedoes and tulips

and God’s grace. Then she opened

her mouth. I did what men do then

and she did what some women never do

and afterwards I went onto the porch for a smoke.

When I returned, she had the

.38 I had planted in my luggage

aimed at my head

because they’ve got to be able to grab hold

of them and squeeze them tight

and if they can’t

they know they don’t have anything at all. She

pulled the trigger and the hammer collapsed

once, twice

onto empty chambers. I took it from her then and gave her

a love tap to the forehead and tied her to a chair.

I checked on the cash in the trunk of the car

like bills had legs and neurosis was normal

but it was all there.

4.

I returned to the cabin

and gave it eyes for tomorrow.

The dame raised her head

as if self preservation was

some savage cross to bear

and she spit at me. Her eyes

carried in them the music

of the devil’s encore. I walked out

as she wailed at the grey night

and I lit another smoke and then I lit

the siding of the cabin

and snapped the zippo shut

like an art form

and I watched the flames crawl

like a mass of insects

up the walls of the thing until

it tore the night open under the

strings of rain.

The sky had inked down, and,

with the red wind at my back

I would make Vegas just past midnight.

YOU KNOW HOW IT IS

So I’m writing on the porch without a shirt and I look like the author photo of hem in for whom the bell tolls. I look like a man. Working on a man’s novel, a big novel that recognizes both the paper clip and the cosmos are tragic. I had more coffee. It too was tragic.

In late summer of that year, we hid inside and had our air conditioned to stave off the tragic outdoors.

And the Starbucks was always crowded. Tragically.

A big novel. A man’s novel. Big. Tragic. A man who faces the tragic empty page without a shirt in the desert, where it is hot, this desert being like most deserts.

And no shirt. Tragic.

He would like to get in the boat and catch the great fish, but the desert holds no fish, tragic or otherwise.

He would instead do what he had always done and he would write. And was like a man writing.

Or some men writing.

Or at least me writing,

He was thinking about air conditioners

and the weak men who invented and used them. Men not worthy of the tragic.

Belmonte, the greatest bullfighter of all, a ballet of choreographed death, the Stratovarius of poking stabbing, the great Belmonte would never sit in conditioned air, the great Belmonte who died in a Mexican desert of dehydration and of course of several unexplained bullet holes which, as in most such cases, exonerated all but the most tragically focused of the bulls.

Belmonte. The great Belmonte with only his strange tight pants that can make men feel unmanly and funny in their men’s pants…and his silly jacket and was eaten by the desert buzzard. Tragically. Buzzards are the absurd, the medieval, but not the tragic. Honor would have visited the very great and very dead Belmonte had a great and tragic fish picked him tragically clean in the desert’s tragic bleaching sun.

Buzzards.

none of which was a Fish,

let alone a great tragic fish and then as he wrote of the fish and the great bullfighter, he was not certain the great fish would eat the great Belmonte.

I walked out to the street. The ice vendors of Havana dropped their blocks in front of the stores and cafes.

A man alone thinks and this too is tragic.

Both

The man alone

And the thinking.

In the tragic desert, there is no news of the great fish.

The great Belmonte in his tragic strange tragic pants that make men or at least one man who is used to speaking for many man

The universal I that Hem and the others speak of.

These men, universally so, are tragic and

feel funny and not in a weak laughing way.

But a tragic virility. Or the lack thereof.

Only more so.

The ice of Cuba. Gone. Melting with a tragic code of its own.

Or…perhaps…the mind wanders and thus ampersand and maybe and

Perhaps

it is merely the heat

the tragic heat

and nothing more

Note to my Students Prior to the First Day

….

Also, we lost Fiona…which is sad as

she is a fine writer and person

…but/and she was living on a house boat.

That sank.

or

had some sewage problem.

or,

maybe it had

some sewage problem

that led to the houseboat sinking.

it was a bit unclear.

her novel was a good deal

more understandable

than the email.

however

I’ve never had my shit-laden houseboat sink and I

have no idea

how it affects one’s prose.

seriously…

it’s a very sad thing.

Rob Roberge is the author of five books—the memoir Liar (a Barnes and Nobel Discover Great New Writers pick) and four books of fiction—the novels The Cost of living, More Than They Can Chew, and Drive and the short story collection Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life. His stories and essays have been widely published and anthologized. As a musician, he has released two roots-rock solo albums, and he plays with LA’s art-punk band The Urinals. His solo full length ambient experimental/electronic composition, Music for 11 Guitars is scheduled for release in 2026. He lives in Chicago and the southern California high desert, where he’s at work on a new novel and what he thinks may be poems.