Will of the People

"Observation Post #798"
Brian Turner

It is in the watches of the night
that impressions are strongest
and words most eloquent.
—Qur’an 73:1

Tonight, we overwatch the Market District
by the ruins, where we know of a brothel-house:
green light above the door, windows shuttered
in French panels swung open, gauze curtains
hanging translucent in the heat.

It’s over a hundred degrees, even at dusk.
I scan each story with binoculars
and a smile, hoping to glimpse the girls
drawing open the curtains,
their silhouettes edged in light.

When a woman walks out onto the rooftop
smoking a cigarette and shaking loose her long hair,
everyone wants what I hold in my hands,
but I am stilled by her, transported 7,600 miles
away, as a ghost might gaze upon the one he loves,

thinking, how lovely you are,
your pain and beauty a fiction
I bend into the form of a bridge, anything
to remind me I am still alive.

---

I knew/winter was in store for every leaf/on every tree on that road.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

"the fidelity of epitaphs (20 days later)"
Marty McConnell

you want to change something about your life
but your lover took both pairs of tweezers.
so you settle for shaving your legs again
and writing around one calf
in drunken pen the lines you keep
reciting to yourself from Marie’s poem
and which you will get
tattooed on that spot as soon

as the credit card company agrees
to pay for it: I am living.
I remember you. yesterday
you wrote a poem that began,
I go to work under a heavy
turban of grief and last week,
Gabi, I’ve been drafting epitaphs
all day – you find an old
pair of tweezers in the back
of the medicine cabinet

and get pulling. each sweet yank
a morsel of pain so good you begin
to understand those teenagers
who carve themselves into scarecrow
figurines. this small pain has
a location. a yes
and an end. what no one tells you
about grief is that it has no edges.
that no matter how much

you love the world, how grateful you are
for sunflowers and trashcans
and your unglamorously aging bones,
you’ll still have dreams
where you’re screaming across a table
at each other about something, you can’t
figure out why until you realize

she died. and here you are. a dull
pair of tweezers in a cluttered apartment,
crying on the floor. you want to make
something beautiful out of your life
but you never learned to paint
and you’re nearly 37. you have

no children and you burn dinner
more often than you dance. you feel

like a cloth set down on something spilled.
useful but soiled. handy, but not essential.
maybe you’ll evaporate, or come apart

in the wash. maybe you’ll figure out
what binds you to this planet
is not a magnet, but a cord so fine
you can slide it across one hand, fold

your fingers around the slippery
umbilical. pull. here is sorrow.
pull. and here is bread. pull. some light
breaks across the linoleum. pull.
where do we go from here.

---

You learn to ask almost anything/is to ask it to be over

"What The Living Do"
Marie Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

---

I would have sworn I had posted this poem years ago, and yet I cannot find it in the archive. My grandmother told me the other day she can't remember her husband's voice anymore. It is still shocking to her every time she realizes that she spent decades with him and loved him terribly and yet she cannot recall the sound of his voice. I'm going to look for old home videos -- maybe somewhere in a basement or closet we have him on tape and she can hear him alive again.

Sing for us whose troubles//are troubles we're lucky to have

"The Answers"
Stephen Dunn

Why did you leave me?

We had grown tired together. Don't you remember?
We'd grown tired together, were going through the motions.

Why did you leave me?

I don't know, really. There was comfort in that tiredness.
There was love.

Why did you leave me?

You began to correct my embellishments in public.
You wouldn't let me tell my stories.

Why did you leave me?

She is... I don't wish to be
any more cruel than I've been

You son-of-a-bitch.

Why did you leave me?

I was already gone.
I just brought my body with me.

Why did you leave me?

You found out and I found I couldn't give her up.
I was as shocked as you were.

Why didn't you lie to me?

I was already lying to you. It was hard work.
All of it suddenly felt like hard work.

Why did you leave me?

I wanted to try monogamy again.
I wanted the freedom to be monogamous.

You fucker. You fucking son-of-a-bitch.

Why did you leave me?

I wanted you both. I thought I could be faithful
to each of you. You shouldn't have made me choose.

Don't you know what betrayal is?

I never thought of it as betrayal. More like one pleasure
of mine you should never have known.

You really are quite an awful man.

Why did you leave me?

It was time to leave.
The hour of leaving had come.

Why did you leave me?

It would take too long to explain. Please
don't ask me to explain.

Will you not explain it to me?

No, I will not explain it to you. I'll say anything
rather than explain it to you. Even things that sound true.

---

sixteen, diving/from the pier. It was summer. His arms/outstretched.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

http://lawandthemultiverse.com/2013/05/25/the-courtroom-antics-of-golden-age-green-lantern/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-courtroom-antics-of-golden-age-green-lantern

http://lawandthemultiverse.com/?p=2400

Today’s post comes from an email from an anonymous reader, who pointed us to this fantastic bit of Golden Age Green Lantern weirdness.  The blogger over at What Were They Thinking?! wonders if the Green Lantern’s antics wouldn’t be grounds for a mistrial, and our reader had a few questions of their own:

1: Would the witness’s confession be admissible in a court of law, considering it was compelled under threat? Basically, would the events of the last panel have happened the same in a court in today’s time?

2: Could the defendant’s threat to the witness be used against him in this trial (assuming it wasn’t declared a mistrial) or in a subsequent trial?

(Just in case the link goes dead, I’ll summarize the events of the comic.  The Green Lantern, as his secret identity Alan Scott, is observing the trial of the alleged leader of a slavery ring.  The prosecution’s main witness, one of the henchmen, proves uncooperative on the stand, so Scott changes into his Lantern outfit and returns to the courtroom, where he threatens to kill the henchman if he doesn’t tell the truth.  The henchman then points the finger at the defendant, who gives the henchman a death threat of his own.  This apparently leads to a guilty verdict for the defendant and the day is saved.)

I’m not going to try to figure out exactly what the relevant law was like in the 1940s.  And like many DC heroes, Alan Scott didn’t operate in a well-defined location anyway (originally “Capitol City“).  Instead I’ll approach this from the perspective of modern law and use our favorite generic big city stand-in, New York.

I. Mistrials

In New York, a mistrial can be declared at the discretion of the trial judge, either at the judge’s own direction or on a motion by one of the parties.  However, the judge must declare a mistrial on a motion by the defendant if at any time during the trial there occurs “conduct inside … the courtroom, which is prejudicial to the defendant and deprives him of a fair trial.” N.Y. Crim. Proc. Law § 280.10(1).  A disturbance in the courtroom (such as an outburst from a member of the public) will not ordinarily result in a mistrial unless it leads to such prejudice.

So what would be prejudicial against the defendant?  Well, having a witness give inadmissible, coerced testimony might be one such thing, especially since the prosecution’s case evidently hinged on that testimony.  It would be pretty hard to ask the jury to ignore what the witness said, especially after the defendant’s own threatening response.  What’s worse, the judge didn’t even try to exclude the improper testimony or have the Green Lantern removed from the court room. So a mistrial would seem to be appropriate, either from the trial judge or on appeal.

It’s true that mistrials are rarely granted in the real world, but this is a really egregious case, far beyond the typical case of a witness making a minor remark, such as accidentally referring to a defendant’s parole status.

II. Admissibility

As indicated above, I don’t think that the witness’s statement would be admissible.  There does not seem to be a specific rule in New York excluding coerced testimony or testimony given under duress, but New York does have its own common law version of FRE 403. People v Scarola, 71 N.Y.2d 769 (1988).  That is, evidence that is more prejudicial than it is relevant should be excluded.  I don’t know if there are any analogous cases to this one, but it seems pretty clear cut.

The admissibility of the defendant’s response, however, is another matter.  Strictly speaking, such a statement would ordinarily be admissible.  It wouldn’t run afoul of the hearsay rules (i.e. most of the people in the courtroom could testify as to what the defendant said in a future trial).  But the trouble is that explaining why the defendant said that would require explaining the whole Green Lantern outburst, which is really just a backdoor way of introducing the inadmissible witness testimony.  I suspect the defendant’s response would stay out as well.

III. Conclusion

The whole thing is shenanigans piled on top of shenanigans.  How on Earth the Green Lantern thought death threats in open court were a good idea, I don’t know.  Given its position on the last page of the comic, I suspect the writer found themselves painted into a corner and came up with a solution that is remarkable only for its inelegance.  But it’s a good example of how a superhero could actually end up preventing real justice from being done.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

DNA Lounge update, wherein the Long Island Iced Tea is still the drink of amateurs and cheapskates.

Mirrored from jwz.org.