Fin De Siecle.

Fin De Siecle

   There were twenty-three people at the movie theater
   and all of them were dead. One of the soldiers,
   a sergeant, thought it would be amusing to switch
   on the projector. Now humans still moved in two
   dimensions, in Technicolor; often their faces became
   huge, occasionally a single mouth and nose, pair
   of eyes, nearly filling the screen. The face would
   smile, grimace, speak; reveal doubt or lust, anger,
   curiosity.... And the people it faced were all dead.
   The soldiers had come without warning. On the screen
   a man and woman kissed: in the center aisle a hand
   jerked this long after death, then was still. Blood
   had stopped moving. The actress spoke the film's
   title. A fartlike sound rose briefly from where
   most people in the long, dim room lay slumped
   across seat-backs and armrests, across one another
   --some adults on top of children they tried to protect;
   some mouths open, some heads shattered; two women
   gripping hands, two old women severed at the waist
   by weapons on full automatic. Blood everywhere:
   on flesh and clothes, shoes, hair, rings, candy, spilled
   drink, aisle slope and dust under seats, on walls;
   as boot-prints of the soldiers, turning, moving
   back to the lobby. The man on the screen removed
   his shirt, his near-smile was twenty-three inches
   wide. Rwanda or Chiapas, Bosnia ... Sri Lanka,
   East Timor, Colombia or Kosovo or Sierra Leone,
   Chechnya ... The man there on screen got
   his T-shirt entangled with head and arms in trying
   to remove it, because the film was a comedy.
   It was a film from the United States; and yet
   this theater was on another continent--with no
   automation changing reels. So now as this first
   reel ended, the screen images vanished without
   The End, no end-credits or music. There was
   simply raw light, and twenty-three corpses edged
   by it. Blood upon them and seats glowed dimly.

Dennis Trudell's "Fragments in Us" was published by the University of Wisconsin Press. He edited "Full Court: Stories & Poems for Hoop Fans." His recent chapbook of movie poems, "Marquees of Buffalo," is from Parallel Press.