Laura Cronk
Summer 2024 | Poetry
Two Poems
Who Knows the Sadness of Steel as It Is Being Made?
What do new knives murmur, waiting together in darkness?
How black is the concrete where tears collect,
the tears dripping from the knives’ eyes?
When bullets cry, massed in their cases, do their tears make condensation?
What child wipes the bullet cases dry?
Who knows the resistance of a missile, hunched against its purpose?
How much does it hurt? For a missile as it rips the sky?
Why does pain make mirrors? Why do missiles feel
what the earth felt as iron ore was ripped from its wound?
What becomes the earth’s tongue, feeling for what was taken?
Who turned God into a pillar of salt?
Was it the same one who threw acid into the face of the sky?
Is the sky so bright because it is blind?
Which of the exiled mothers look back at us forever?
Calling us to rest under mounds of drenched leaves.
The Killers
I’m hiding my best things from the killers.
The killers like fine things. You wouldn’t guess
they’d care, but they do.
Carnelian amulets, first edition books, a rare violin,
paintings, even an island so small it has just one
perfect cottage, jasmine vining up around the door.
They take treasured things before and after killing.
The killers aspire to the highest posts, which offer
access to the best things. They eat with silver
that is centuries old, made by someone in pain.
They can taste it. They ride in opaque, lacquered,
armored cars. And they get to kill the most.
Individual assassinations are prestige deaths,
lots of impact with just one flame extinguished.
But scale is important to the killers, too.
They increase their numbers as the writers argue
about word choice - mass murder? Genocide?
Civilians or militants or enemy children?
The killers have a well where they store
accumulated death, they look down
into the unctuous, sequined depth.
When they pray at the well for strategy they let
a spider crawl up their arms, up their necks.
And when they hear a faint nocturne,
just glimmering like the start of a migraine,
they know they’re ready to accomplish more.
I’m hiding my best things from the killers
even though, I can’t fool myself, they would
kill me without bothering to collect them.
Laura Cronk is the author of two books from Persea Books, most recently, Ghost Hour. She teaches poetry, multi-genre writing, and pedagogy courses in the Writing & Democracy Honors Program and the MFA in Creative Writing at The New School.