The Friday Poem

A poem every Friday

The Friday Poem on 14/06/2024

It begins realistically. We’re in “a rough deck chair / in a tiny gravel park”, and it must be warm because we’re outside, ready for a video screening. A cultural event, then, and high culture, no less, because we’re about to see and hear Elisabeth in Wagner’s Tannhäuser, praying for mercy. But then more cultural references are hurled into the mix. On the one hand, there are “melting nymphs” cast in bronze. At the same time, the narrator recalls a Vlad Dracul anime scene (the absence of mercy), and then he sees three possible representations of mercy here and now. We end with the weirdest of these: a young girl dressed as a fox. We inhabit an incredibly rich and strange cultural mix, all of us, every day. It is extraordinary, isn’t it?

Vlad Dracul Is Pissed Off That You People Killed His Wife

Human sacrifice really is back in fashion.
       – Sypha, Castlevania

I’m sitting in a rough deck chair
in a tiny gravel park on the edge 
of what the city calls its town square 
for the arts, an unsanctioned bottle
of corner store water I snuck in 
sweating on an equally tiny table 
sawn from a cracked tree trunk.

I’m watching a pre-performance video
broadcast on a drive-in kind of screen
through a bronze statue of a doorframe,
its door desultorily decorated
with what I take to be melting nymphs.
The narrator’s giant head explains
that we’ll soon enough see
Princess Elisabeth on her knees
in early winter, prostrate in frost,
begging Heaven’s mercy
for her wayward knight,
but then says, casually, that nobody
really understands what Wagner
was thinking with that scene.

My eye fixates on that giant head.
There’s a scene in a popular
online anime where Vlad Dracul
manifests his face over a medieval 
town square, threatening vengeance
with no mercy on all of humanity
for burning his mortal wife at the stake.

Can mercy be found in town squares?
How would it manifest?
For the sake of it, I scan the scene
through the door: four middle-aged men
at a metal table take turns killing off
their overpriced bottle of wine. 
An elderly couple wait in line
to present their wards and charms
against plague.
A young girl in a summer dress,
a fox tail tied to her skirt,
wanders through the crowd
with soft eyes and perked ears.

Matthew Bullen holds an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University and is the founder and editor-in-chief of Red Ogre Review, an indie press that publishes an online journal of contemporary poetry and visual art, along with a poetry chapbook series. Matt has poetry published with Arsenic Lobster, Broken Antler, BS/WS, Cape Magazine, FERAL, glassworks, Harpy Hybrid Review, Quibble Lit, Rejection Letters, The Daily Drunk (SMOL Fair Zine), tiny frights, and Underwood. His first microcollection, Who Needs a Door When You Have a Fence, was recently published by Rinky Dink Press. He has also published creative nonfiction with National Geographic and the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, and fine art photography with Exist Otherwise, Punk Monk Magazine, and Setu Magazine. He lives in Santa Monica, California.

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