Two Poems
Fran Noel
We Pronto
Skidmarks plastered on the side of the road.
Pure American steel, feeding local Americans.
It’s local.
It’s medical.
It’s the power of just ingredients.
Whether you live in Midvale
Or eastern Jordan,
Longevity is a contemporary term.
Wheels kick up droplets
The engine revs a symphony.
Principally, it’s not a choice.
When lines and valleys impress upon your face,
It’s easier to use a person than to see one.
We’re living in the 22nd century.
Ha det bra, self-storage, lakeview and best friends,
Steel placed on the terrace
Mixed between hash and the bank.
It’s easy when you’re used to it.
It’s hard to hear at all.
Do you see the red, white, and blue shuttle cars?
Everywhere’s Vegas, if you’re dedicated enough.
Can instruments weep?
In Memory of Benjamin Britten
And the wall that shattered glass over your shoulder
Where the wine covered your head in blood.
It’s antique.
It’s vintage.
Raised up on the cross,
Memory loves to go hunting in the dark.
You coup my eyes like a yawn.
Favor lies salt trickling down your tongue.
I saw god stamp out snow under my boots,
Couture covered smoke in your altar.
Take the gun.
Peal-white smooth marble teeth click into my arms,
Adding a new number for each exit,
Vertigo slumped against the doorway.
Sun belt’s antelopes and honeycombs are tasty, aren’t they?
For almost two hundred and fifty years,
Thousands of weeds have bridged over
Terra firma, wholesale goods, leaves by the trunk in the spring of ’06.
The truth is,
When you misspelled parish for pariah,
I knew it was on purpose.
Let me help you remember
You tried to erase my name.
I’ll find it sooner than later,
But we write the same way, over and over,
Crossing out the same words we continue to write.
Pull the trigger.
Amen breaks, saturated, crashing downwards:
You will forfeit all desire to be free.
Smoke billows out of the highway.
HURRICANE BEAT DOWN HILLS OF APPALACHIA
title reads: rivers roll down rumbling surging the crickets
dyed by piles of coal turning rivers black
once-bustling streets filled with empty warehouses
glass windows shriek telephone poles timber.
A boy’s body two hundred miles away was found;
I saw it on the news.
“Didn’t know me from Adam,
and asked me to hold him in his arms,” the old man choked out.
And the girl called nine-one-one and simply said “he isn’t breathing”
in a confused, almost awed voice.
They uploaded the audio file of it;
Millions of people saw it on their phones.
The future is moving too quickly now
Dust is snowing onto steel bridges again
over the valleys, into the damp earth.
Fran Noel graduated in 2025 with a major in computer science and a minor in creative writing. They enjoy reading, writing, and producing music.