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The Silver Screen Asks, “What’s Up Danger?” After We Enter

By Steven Leyva

a lobby shaped like a yawn, lined with lodestone
leftover from making the marquee. The congress

of picture shows and pulp flicks it seems
named this movie house, the Senator.

Or maybe the city loves to signify. I guess
it matters little to a mill worker,

stevedore, or teamster how the name
came to be. My son and daughter

who will never walk home covered in soot,
longing for a moment in the mud room

to be responsible for nothing
but removing a coat, unlacing a boot,

my children slide like two slightly rusted magnets
toward the aluminum rail posts guarding

the popcorn counter. All the candy encased
in glass like masks in a museum. They’ve forgotten

our talk in the parking lot about Miles Morales,
about his animated face being so near to us

even without 3D, that this afro-latino Spider-man
could be our cousin, in a more marvelous universe.

But when they sit in the Senator’s un-stadiumed
seats, with the ghosts of reel-to-reel clicking

their tongues, what I see on my children’s faces
is not a season of phantasmal peace, but what’s left

when the world’s terrors retreat. Their whole brown
skin illuminated, like a trailer for another life.

 

 

 

Listen as Steven Leyva reads
"The Silver Screen Asks, “What’s Up Danger?” After We Enter."
Added: Monday, July 8, 2019  /  Used with permission.
Steven Leyva
Photo by Chris Hartlove.

Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 2 Bridges Review, Fledgling Rag, The Light Ekphrastic, jubilat, Vinyl, and Prairie Schooner. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the chapbook Low Parish. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an assistant professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.

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