FIRST BOOKS ISSUE Sandra Beasley   THEORIES OF FALLING After years of research, I can only guarantee that if you go over Niagara in a kayak, you will die. A ball of chicken wire and quilts? You might make it. Oak barrel? You'll walk away, thought just to die in a poor house ten years later. The odds drop above the eighth floor window yet even from 30,000 feet, a canopy of trees may catch you. Luck comes to fighter pilots and Czech stewardesses. Rotoscope cameras have captured the cat as he swivels first head, then spine, aligns his hind legs, arches for impact. He turns this helix over and over until the ground rises to meet him. He bounces. We do not bounce. Not that we don't have a knack for certain kinds of falling: bringing a man home after five rounds of bourbon because the snow has piled up, and he has no coat. Leaving three friends to try hailing a taxi to Virginia while he burrows for warmth and says You're so good, you're so good to me— hands diagramming every curve, a kind of sleepy, lustful mathematics. Swivel your head, align your legs. See if you can land on your feet. Sometimes an elevator cable does snap— there is an immediate heat, the squeal of atoms torn away. As you hurtle to the bottom you may think If I time this right, I can be in the air when it hits. From the outside we see this makes no difference— what matters is speed relative to the earth, not the floor of the elevator. But you are not outside. You're in the cage, bracing your knees, blood coiling in your heels. So go ahead— Jump, for God's sake. Jump like your life depends on it. YOU You are the whole building on fire. You are the voice of sirens. You are the dumb crowd milling, the capture of Weegee's lens. You are flames licking up the escape. You're the hovering of a mother at the cliff of her window ledge. You are the choice to drop her baby. You're the chance of a beckoning crowd, six hands gripping a sooty raincoat. You are the only option. You're a simple drop. Ten stories below they pray you're like a cloud, soft floating. You are like a cloud. Grey and you don't hold anything. You are that moment before a falling, the falling, a whir of falling, a wail of falling, the sweet thud. You are black blood flaring across the concrete. You are a needle in the groove of a very sad song. The whole building burns with you. Richard Dana Fairy Tale mixed media on wood 2005 80" x 36” view more work by Richard Dana SMALL KINGDOM Who doesn't love a small kingdom? The lion has her pride, the mole her starnosed tunnel. My mother grows three kinds of basil, and I collect movie stubs in a box marked Memories. A whelk knows only the golden ratio of its chambers, the figure 8 of nerve endings— drawbridge mantle, moat ocean. Washed up, its perfect enclosure reeks of salt. I sort by color. I file by coast. I know a man by the cans and coffee cups he leaves in his car, the thick puppy mess of him. Who doesn't dream of cleaning out her small kingdom, tilting the whole stable on its Augean edge? Who doesn't love the disaster of her own making? Boy, give up your slow reach before I try to fix your life, before I let your shell jangle to dust in my pocket, before I burn your operculum gate for incense. I don't know how to keep you without killing you a little—the way my mother pares down the rosemary each year to keep its flavor bright. The way we must make all loves smaller before they can enter our kingdom. THE FLOOD Soon they will take the blue mask off your face. Soon they will unzip your thickening blood. The only bible on hand is Reader's Digest and I study, "The Latest Medicine" "Drama in Real Life": A man walks forty miles after being mauled by a bear. I am Joe's Lungs. Caught in her fractured car, a woman lasts a week on two potatoes. I am Jane's Esophagus. Soon they'll take to pricking your toe with a ballpoint pen. Then they'll hand me that pen and ask Sign here, please. And here. Over and over I read about Johnstown in 1889—ten inches of rain dropped in one day. As a dam bulges, there's always someone on duty to look to the valley. He sees what will follow: the stone bridge that'll collapse and pulverize rail cars, the ironworks fated to crown people in barbed wire as they burn. Soon they will tell me We only receive what we can bear. There's always someone whose job is to ring the alarm, but be honest: there's no plan for sixty feet of hungry water. There is only a line of someones, heaping dirt on the breaking point. We try to fill the belly of a flood with our little buckets. Soon everything will be a swallowing. THE ANGELS They have two noses; six eyes in the arch of each foot. They never tire of blinking down at the Americans— our surfboards, machine guns, our dancing hamsters. The way we shower every day, then rub more oil into our skin. One notes There is no end to the number of things they can hydrogenate. Once checks the spaces in bubble wrap to see if we store useful things inside. Every April two men create a thing; then the fruit flies start dying. By each November one man has a button, and four thousand men have the job of making sure he does not push the button. One angel notes There is no end to the number of buttons. One visits a hundred random bedrooms. His third ear records that Oh, God is still popular. He notes a rise in couples sleeping side by side, holding hands tightly. He calls this the Red Rover, Red Rover position. Four are assigned to the homeless and ten to schoolteachers, who tend to jump from bridges more often. The one in charge of soldiers sketches the long beard of Mr. Maupin, who swore he wouldn't shave until his son came home. Mr. Maupin sleeps in a blue recliner, still in his fishing vest: one pocket stuffed with lures, the other with laminated baseball cards of his son Matt's face. The backsides show an angel, all cookie-cutter wings and halo, yellow ribbons for hair, declaring Not one left behind. The angel sighs and goes to sip whiskey with the angel of telemarketers. Every night they watch lights dance across thousands of blue screens as if, they note, constellations. Every night they listen to the click of our million keyboards, toasting the sound American souls make as they collide.   Sandra Beasley won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize for Theories of Falling, selected by Marie Howe. Awards for her work include the 2008 Poets & Writers Maureen Egen Exchange Award, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, and fellowships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Millay Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She lives in Washington, DC, where she serves on the board of the Writer's Center and writes periodic columns for the Washington Post Sunday Magazine's "XX Files." She is working on Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a nonfiction book forthcoming from Crown. The poems here are reprinted from Theories of Falling, with permission from New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University. For more information on the book, see: http://www.wmich.edu/newissues/.   Published in Volume 10:2, Spring 2009.