Host of the New Reality

RichardKrohn

Imagine a bold new TV reality, camera on its self-proclaimed creator, panning to a set filled with chirping birds. Beneath each shiny ficus, a teeming fish tank and bowl of untouchably perfect fruit.

He casts in his own image a trim, handsome man joined by willowy mate, both naked as newborns except for genital blurs, and thus the first week ends, which he pronounces great.

But by the next show they’ve bitten into the apples and soon he tells them

You’re fired! Commanded to cover up and leave, as they slink away, they’re joined by two brothers who bloody each other. One dies.

Season after season the cast swells, the babbling rabble disgraced by fraud and petty jealousy, by corrupt flushes, clogs and inevitable flood, their towering smallness, the Egypt of their debt.

And yet the creator sees himself above it all, magnificent, munificent even as the cast plague each other, mooning about the set as roaches abound, he the only one who can fix it.

And so it goes, no fit of scorpions or locusts, no reunion of diasporascattered cast, just the reality, slouching toward last disaster, at some point abruptly cancelled, and yet, he hopes, re-running forever

Richard Krohn has spent most of his life up and down the East Coast, but he has also spent many years in the Midwest and in Central America. He currently teaches Economics and Spanish at Moravian University in Pennsylvania. In addition to TPJ, his poetry is most commonly found in Tar River, Poet Lore, I-70, Rio Grande, Concho River and Paterson.

We shipped the parts via sluggish milk trains from Dayton to the Outer Banks; they arrived before we did. The Algonquins had named the place Kitty Hawk and believed that in the afterlife they too could fly, brave hunters.

We chose this beach for its expanse of sand and lifting wind. No fences, rooftops, barbed fences, gawking bystanders. We wanted our gliders to be swift, and took weeks to assemble and test them on the other side of Kill Devil Hills.

We made over 700 test flights, sometimes 30 or more a day if the winds blessed our airfoils. If not, we were beached. But then came success-Wilbur soared for 12 seconds and covered over 120 feet. The salt spray was like a baptism; we gave birth to American aviation and wrote the Declaration of Independence for air travelers, freeing them from pesky nags and smelly smoke puffs.

How ironic that our achievement in the air was honored by a heavy monument on the Outer Banks made from 12 tons of concrete and two of granite. And sad that the termites ate the replicas of our gliders, a reminder that it may be impossible to forever slip the surly bonds of earth unless, of course, you were an Algonquin warrior.

Philip C. Kolin is the Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus and Editor Emeritus of the Southern Quarterly at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published over 40 books on Tennessee Wiliams, Shakespeare, and contemporary African American women playwrights and including fifteen collections of poetry, among the most recent being Delta Tears: Poems (Main Street Mag, 2020), Americorona: Poems about the Pandemic (Wipf and Stock, 2021), and Mapping Trauma: Poems about Black History (Third World Press, 2023).