Smoke on the Water

by Dzvinia Orlowsky

 

Even in China, the fans no longer

give a damn about Deep Purple’s last world

tours, but our town’s Middle School band

conductress still showcases the song,

pushing the tempo fast, baton raised,

under arms swinging fiercely

like hammocks

in a Midwest storm.

 

Once, cheerleader-sexy under bleachers

in cold November air,

the pride of our county

is now a dry-cleaner’s

hot ticket sweating profusely

in a starched three-quarter-sleeved

white jacket.

 

The horn section seems to suffer

most – black slacks, starched shirts

wafting Axe – hair water slicked,

ears, cheeks flaming red,

eyes burning through sheet music,

every note blown cavernous

into just some adult shit song.

 

Disperse the smoke,

Drain the water.

 

Long stripped of Purple’s

leather pants and sooty asses,

parents love her song choice.

It signals the end of the school year,

dented rental instruments turned in,

locked all summer in their metal cages.

 

As long as they start and end together,

doesn’t matter what they play in between.

My husband’s own favorite:

Any one hurt?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We fold our programs, let out a collective

discreet sigh of relief, smile as we file

to our cars, a light drumming of rain

on the hoods –

 

Did we really think we’d ever lose

those heavy booted chords?

 

No turning back

the worn tape rattles

the car’s speakers’ bass blast,

windshield wipers slashing

the short ride home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dzvinia Orlowsky

Dzvinia Orlowsky is Pushcart prize poet, translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books. She’s published six full-length poetry collections with Carnegie Mellon University Press including her most recent, Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry and Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones (2009) for which she received a Sheila Motton Book Award. Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was selected by Robert Pinsky as the 2019 co-winner of the New England Poetry Club Samuel Washington Allen Prize. In 2014, Dialogos published Jeff Friedman’s and her co-translation of Memorials: A Selection by Polish poet Mieczysław Jastrun for which she and Friedman were awarded a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship. Her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s selected poems, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, (Lost Horse Press), was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, ALTA’s National Translation Book Award in Poetry, and winner of the 2020-2021 American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize.  Her and Ali’s co-translations from the Ukrainian of Halyna Kruk’s poetry is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in 2024 and her new poetry collection, Those Absences Now Closest, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in fall, 2024.  Dzvinia is a contributing poetry editor at Solstice Literary Magazine, founding director of Night Riffs: A Solstice Literary Magazine Reading and Music Series. and Poet-in-Residence at the Solstice MFA Program for Creative Writing.  

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