Geoff Kagan Trenchard’s poems have been published in numerous journals including Word Riot, The Nervous Breakdown, The Worcester Review, SOFTBLOW and November 3rd. He has received endowments from the National Performance Network, Dance Theater Workshop, The Zellerbach Family Foundation and the City of Oakland to produce original theatrical work. As a mentor for Urban Word NYC, he taught weekly poetry workshops in the foster care center at Bellevue as well as in Rikers Island with Columbia University’s “Youth Voices on Lockdown” program. He is a recipient of a fellowship from the Riggio Writing and Democracy program at the New School and the first ever louderARTS Writing Fellowship. He has performed poetry on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, at universities throughout the United States, and in theaters internationally as a member of the performance poetry troupe “The Suicide Kings”. He lives in Brooklyn.

Five Poems (March 20, 2011. Issue 26. The SLAM & FLASH Issue!)

Back to the front

Over beer and seasoned curly fries Matt tells me about the war.
How Iraqi street kids call the troops vampires
because of the eerie green-eyed glow
from their night vision goggles.

How they will in turn spit cherry Gatorade
and smile like a hacksaw. You have to keep it
tight on a patrol, he says. You have to
keep it tight. We lost touch after graduation.

He worked as a repo man and as an exterminator.
Joined the army because stealing cars legally didn’t
have a medical plan for his son’s asthma and the spray
used to kill roaches peals the skin off your ankles in sheets.

He says roadside bombs aren’t planted by anyone in a militant group.
Rather then risk their own people on something so small they pay
some non-affiliated citizen fifty bucks that feeds a family
of four for a month. The recruiter said he’d be in Iraq for a year, tops.

When Matt had been there three he got a dear john e-mail
form his fiancé. Now he’s on his fourth refill of Xanaxs.
Army issue anti depressants are given out in thousand count bottles.
Because Matt is a medic, his CO encouraged him to dole them out however he saw fit.

In our Junior year he clicked up with a crew of skinheads. Said it was the only way
a white boy could walk around this neighborhood with his chin up.
I remember standing in his bathroom doorway watching the clippers spit
hair off his skull. Asked what I should think about him joining a club

that’s usually swung at people like me. Said as far as he was concerned,
I was white enough. So I became the punk all the jocks wanted to jump
cause I dressed like a fag but couldn’t because I was the Jew who had
a pack of skin head friends. I buy the next round of shots

and I ask Matt if the guys ankle deep in blood and sand
think about the war. Says most of them know they dying for profits
they’ll never see and a people that don’t want them there because the country
they swore to protect needed someone to swing at. Says even if there was a magic wand

that would bring all the boys home with the ease of a credit card swipe
no one would use it. As long as they’re out there, he says,
we have to fight them. As I sit in this air conditioned bar,
looking at a parking lot full of unexploded cars

filled with expensive gasoline, I am bereft of argument.
I know how ready for war Matt looked in his straight laces
and number one crop. How he would sing along
to my Smiths tape when no one else was around.

How he once fended off fifteen Norteños with a skateboard
and knife with a swastika carved in the handle and cried
when his friend got kicked face first into a barbwire fence.
I don’t ask if he still believes that white people

are some how more on his side. When we leave here
he will still be locked into a uniform I am again
unable to talk him out of.

Dirty Harry speaks to a 6th grade classroom at Througood Marshal Elementary

Every day, he kicks him self a little harder for not retiring
when the house was still worth something. He could be
on a boat facing a setting sun. Instead, it’s a white

knuckle ride toward mandatory retirement. Praying the pension will still be there
when he crosses the line. So he’s here. Where it is exactly as awkward
as you imagine. The commissioner said two community outreach visits

per week, so it might as well been written in the 10 commandments. There was a clearly
bullet pointed memo listing what could and could not be said. He starts off
with his sphell about the paperwork he never bothers with.

The students are off screen stares while they text under desks, but one girl in the front
row with a raised hand, is an open palm protest.
Mr. Callahan, you ever kill anybody?

The red and black beads woven into her hair are a wave the rest of the class
has just perked up to crest. The teacher looks up from last weeks grading
ready to carpet bomb the whole room in shush. Harry remembers

how it used to be. How even in the tender loins of the city kids this age were at least
a few years older before they could tell who fired the shots by how many seconds
between each crack. When not so many boys in a class like this

would have something lethal in a shoebox at home. His sneer that could strip
the varnish off a foot locker dilutes to neutral. He knows the next time he sees
her it’s likely to be though a Plexiglas reflection, or bloody.

There is no harm in telling the truth today.
Yes, young lady, I have.

South of Heaven

In the tedious stretch between 11 am and 4 pm at the AT&T store Thomas remembers
the things he’s done. The weight of the chain is in his hand again. Leading the enemy combatants by five point restraints to the processing room. They strip naked under a bare bulb as Slayer blasts over the PA, as if Satan himself was screaming at them. After
the hospital smocks and blind hoods, Thomas moves them to their cells. The Lieutenant never has him do the heavy work. It isn’t him with the collapsible baton or guard dog. His job is to assist. To inflate the rubber glove for the sissy slap. To refill saline IV
and mop up the piss. Once a week, rearrange the wall of blue teeth and car adapters.
The schedule in the break room is written in the same handwriting as the one hung
in Building 2. All the bills in his register face the same direction.

The night before he shipped out, all the members of his band got matching pentagrams tattooed on their left shoulders. Stayed up all night sucking iced bong rips
with South of Heaven cranked to eleven and on infinite repeat. Around 3 in the afternoon,
the opening chords get stuck in his head. He runs out to his car. Smokes a cigarette
down to the filter. Presses the hot cinders into his arm until they go wet. Every surface
of the store gets a Lysol and Windex wipe down. Thomas’ boss likes him.
Appreciates that he finds himself little cleaning projects when it gets slow.
His formal long sleeves, even in the middle of the summer. Never bothers him
about the occasional unscheduled break.

My high school graduation

was in the middle of the football field. June sun cooking us in our plastic
caps and gowns, we sweated like individually wrapped cheese slices

left out at a picnic. As the principal read the list of seniors, his voice the same droll
we heard on every morning intercom, I did my own accounting.

Pregnant friends filled one and a half hands.
Those in jail and or rehab would have required extra toes.

The voice echoing through the stadium gave no mention of Eric, who tried to hang
himself in the gym with a jump rope over the basketball backboard.

Or Bryan, who snuggled the Tech 9 under his chin after being expelled.
As we walked across the stage, they handed us blank pieces of paper

rolled in the style of a diploma. Said the real thing would arrive in the mail later.
Mine never did.