POET OF THE WEEK: BRUCE LADER

Bruce Lader is the founding director of Bridges Tutoring, an organization educating multicultural students. A teacher of disadvantaged teenagers for many years, he holds a Master’s Degree in Special Education, is a former Writer-in-Residence at the Helene Wurlitzer Colony, and has received an honorarium from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara. His first full-length collection, Discovering Mortality (March Street Press, 2005), was a finalist for the Brockman- Campbell Award. He was also a finalist for the 2008 Greensboro Award for Poetry.
A featured reader in many venues, he has worked as a Poet-in-the-Schools of North Carolina, New York, and California. His poems have appeared in over 75 journals and including Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Poet Lore, Potomac Review, Roanoke Review, New Millennium Writings, Asheville Poetry Review, International Poetry Review, Main Street Rag, Iodine Poetry Journal, Harpur Palate, and the anthology, Against Agamemnon: War Poems.






Our Own Blood

The generals deliberate on the climate of war,
insulted that some harebrained foreigners
might beat them at seizing the capital.

The generals read barometers of insiders,
tally missiles and unmanned drones.
Their temperatures escalate as the budget deficit
dives and the foreigners move forward.

The Supreme Commanders would like nothing better
than to turn the tide, reduce the expense of casualties
to zero, risk only what’s necessary,
leave nothing to accident.

Fingers like rolls of million-dollar bills
toying with the buttons of boom,
the generals reckon lives,
plot exact targets via satellite surveillance.

The security of our native land hovers
like Apache helicopters
on a do-or-die sortie.

The generals know it has always been
us or the enemy, the battle between
alien blood and our own.


© The New York Quarterly

B
Continue obeying, don’t get hurt, he repeated,
and parachuted, a man-of-war
beyond barriers of fear,
his life on the line to free the oppressed,
avenge his country
against an enemy he didn’t know.


© Audience



Sortie

Blips of stealth
on reconnaissance radar
alert the PFC;
he determines position,
zeroes in with unflinching telescopic power.
The face and build look familiar
though he isn’t certain he recognizes
the helmeted youth training a rifle on him,
resolved now, as he is,
to execute orders, complete school,
bury debts.
In the desperate moment
they have to decipher each other’s
encoded shibboleth,
identify themselves in the purgatory
where they’ve been conditioned to kill;
or remain lost, detached forever,
blown to a furlough of sand
in the schizoid scrimmage
over a fast killing
at any cost.


© Audience



Student Evaluation

The teacher’s a loser.
Not a scar, hands like Paris Hilton.
Believes kindness can block punches,
enemy knives that slash our blood.

He wears Disney glasses.
Never had a rival gang on his case
burning to steal everything.

Truckers, trash men, dealers
take in more money, drive cooler cars.
He should let us slide
when we don’t do work,
hand out A-pluses, help even the odds.

The nerd uses Odor Eaters,
walks that snobby hood talk,
doesn’t dig hip-hop,
can’t get no other job.

His jokes make us cough.
No one savvies his geezer jive
like How do you open windows
of caring and peace?
As if riddles give respect,
could turn backstabbers into brothers.

When we’re only playing,
he goes buggy, lectures on forgiveness,
bringing home the gold of freedom.
As if mushy dreams can stop
bangers from stomping us.

We want the real deal who can KO,
teach us to get upmarket dinero.

© Café Solo