News For You
FROM THE ONLINE CHAPBOOK FLAMINGO PARK
News for You
Miriam Levine
If I had the golden bough in my hands,
from the tree, which like a salamander
grows another limb, I would find a hole
under the royal palm and go down to
the underworld and find my mother.
She would weep then dry-eyed mock the dead
who say they will be born again
into their earthly bodies,
“Mim, I’ve got news for you,
no one comes back from here;
no god will raise us; not one soul
strong enough to have
rolled time’s wheel
though a thousand years. Believe you me.”
I do. Mother, you can’t hear me
when I speak to you in poems.
In my reverie you say, What? What?
And turn to smoke, yet I keep
writing to you on paper as if I
could send letters, and the P.O. on
Washington and 13th were celestial
and you could answer.
Fat chance, but isn’t it fun
to dance to the Marvelettes?
“Please, Mr. Postman
(Wait, wait a minute Mr. Postman
Deliver the letter, the sooner the better
Wait a minute, wait a minute
(Wait, wait a minute . . . .”
Flamingo Park
Miriam Levine
2026
Flamingo Park is Miriam Levine’s gift to you. The setting of this online chapbook is the Flamingo Park neighborhood of Miami Beach, Florida. The themes, for the most part, are love, death, joy—laughter and tears—the longstanding themes of lyric poetry.