Joel Allegretti, “The Day After the Night John Lennon Died

The Day After the Night John Lennon Died

Joel Allegretti

6:30 a.m., December 9, 1980, post-Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and my bedroom radio is tuned to WNEW-FM, 102.7, “Where Rock Lives,” but there’s no “Pump It Up,” no “tramps like us,” no “Ziggy played guitar.” It’s caller after caller and shock and distress, and I’m immobile in my chair because I’m just finding out, and Some Time in New York City doesn’t seem so bad anymore.

7:45 a.m. The New York Times on the N.J. Turnpike hour bus ride to the Big Apple, and I’m thumbing through the business pages because it’s what they’ll ask about at work and not how many times I heard “Nowhere Man” today, and I begin thinking maybe Two Virgins deserves a second listen.

9 a.m. – 6 p.m. Manhattan is turned into a 22.8-square-mile mortuary, and a million figurative heads are bowed, and can the sky be in mourning, too? I wonder how we measure our grief and imagine that everybody I see, even the socialite in the mink coat leaving the Russian Tea Room and the elderly man in the brown three-piece suit waiting for the light at West 57th Street and 8th Avenue, is playing “Give Peace a Chance” on permanent mental repeat.

The Country of the Dead

Martin Ott

Is difficult to see. It looks like the living but looks can deceive. Its flag waves in bad weather but we can’t agree what it means. The symbols are celestial but its home is red weave. Not the burn of the sunset or the blood of the grieved. The pride of its people is stirred by belief. The legends passed down are burdens indeed. The land that is yours belongs to the sea. The wind has no convictions: it sweeps away greed. The end days hide promises cut into trees. We learn the lesson of storms and the unraveling of we.