Selected Poetry from Issue #48, 2020
Cover Photography by Mark Hillringhouse
Aubade With Concussion
Poverty is black ice.
Naomi Ayala
You leave me sleeping in the dark. You kiss me and I stir,
fingers in your hair, eyes open, unseeing. You leave me asleep
every morning, commuting to the school in the city at sunrise.
The landlord’s driveway, a muddy creek, ices over hard after
the freezing rain clatters all night. Your feet fly up, your head
slamming the ground, an eclipse of the sun flooding your eyes.
You sleep under the car. No one knows how long you sleep.
You awake with a hundred ice picks stabbing your eardrums.
You awake, coat and hair soaked, and somehow drive to school.
You remember to turn left at the Smith & Wesson factory.
The other teachers lead you by the elbow to Mercy Hospital,
where you pause when the nurse asks your name, where you claim
your pain level is a four, and they slide you into the white coffin
of an MRI machine. You hold your breath. They film your brain.
Concussion: the word we use for the boxer plunging face-first
to the canvas after the uppercut blindsided him, not the teacher
commuting to school at sunrise in a Subaru Crosstrek. Yet, you would
drive, ears hammering as they hammer in the purgatory of the MRI.
A week before, Isabela came to you in the classroom and said:
Miss, I cannot sleep. Three days, I cannot sleep. Her boyfriend called
at 2 AM, and she did not pick up. At 3 AM, a single shot to the head
put him to sleep, and he will sleep forever, his body hidden beneath
a car in a parking lot on Maple Street, the cops, the television cameras,
the neighbors all gathering at the yellow-tape carnival of his corpse.
You said to Isabela: Take this journal. Write it down. You don’t have
to show me. You don’t have to show anyone. On the cover of the journal
you bought at the drugstore was the word: Dream. Isabela sat there
in your classroom, at your desk, pencil waving in furious circles.
By lunchtime, as her friends slapped each other, Isabela slept,
head on the desk, face pressed against the pages of the journal.
This is why I watch you sleep at 3 AM, when the sleeping pills fail
to quell the strike meeting in my brain. This is why I say to you,
when you kiss me in my sleep: Don’t go. Don’t go. You have to go.
Martín Espada’s many books of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006) and Alabanza (2003). He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Unwrapping Presents
When I was a girlchild, clothes
given me were always cheap,
used, sometimes with somebody
else’s initials embroidered on.
But books an unmarried aunt sent,
delightful, precious, cared for
until I went off to college
and Mother threw them out.
I still remember some: Lassie
heroine, a carved wooden
boat traveling the Great Lakes
Alice and Sherlock. Twelve
dancing princesses who slipped
each night into an underworld
paradise of freedom. Of course
like all women then and often
now, they were caught, confined.
I can close my eyes, see pictures:
caterpillar on toadstool, deerstalker
hat, trees bearing golden leaves.
Those beloved books live in me
still, images that fertilize
my imagination, stamping who
I became into my hungry brain.
Marge Piercy has published 19 poetry collections, recently MADE IN DETROIT [Knopf]; 17 novels including SEX WARS. PM Press reissued VIDA, DANCE THE EAGLE TO SLEEP; they brought out short stories THE COST OF LUNCH, ETC and MY BODY, MY LIFE [essays, poems]. She has read at over 500 venues here and abroad.
The Hang (In Memory of Blanca)
I remember your hand draped over my knee
and how I prayed it would stay there
Those long hot days on Rahway Avenue
watching the cars go by, sometimes a friend
With a junker Chevy honking at us, sometimes rich kids
From Westfield looking to score drugs.
At High Cue across the street, a roll of dubs
sat under the ashtrays. The old timers
Ran tables, shot nine ball, straight pool,
Had kids to warn them if anyone “official” dropped by.
This guy Oochie tried to rob a wad of cash and was caught
outside, some fat guy with an inhaler kicked his ribs in.
We watched whatever passed us by, sometimes didn’t speak
For hours. What was there to say?
Springsteen sang the poets down here don’t write nothing at all.
They just stand back and let it all be,
but I was always scribbling stuff. I wrote in green pen
on your arm: I sang in my chains like the sea.
You asked me what it meant and I said: Don’t know
But it sounds good, and I think it’s true.
I miss you. You’ve been dead for thirty years. Still
If I try, I can feel the pressure of your arm on my knee.
We never kissed, never made out. Something we kept
circling around never happened. So many nevers
In my life, but if I close my eyes, the traffic and the horns
and the voices of all my ghosts come back.
Some part of me will hang until the night erases us.
And I love the dark I came from, through the doorway of every wound.
Joe Weil is a piano player and storyteller who grew up in industrial Elizabeth, New Jersey. He is now an associate professor at Binghamton University Weil’s poetry, reviews and quotes have appeared in the New Yorker, The Boston Review, Rattle, Paterson Literary Review, Poet lore and The New York Times. His latest book is A Night in Duluth (NYQ books). He lives in Binghamton with his wife Emily, and children, Clare and Gabriel.
Train-Jumper
Interview, Moundsville Penitentiary, 1975
I used to love jumpin trains, he said.
That’s how I got this, he knocked on
his wooden stick leg, old school like
Captain Ahab he said, with a broom handle-
like extension that rose from knee to waist.
The stilt sticking out of his pant leg
below the knee, and gathered up and above it,
like it was stuffed with sheets or cotton or
something soft, and when he walked,
his whole body shook as he swung
his right peg leg around in a half-
circle, enough to power a generator.
About 5 ft. 6 and skinny, with years
on his face in deep cuts of wrinkles
and dark circles of eyes. Sitting in
the visitor room of Moundsville
Penitentiary, he said: I threw a rock
through the window of the pawn shop
to get a gun, robbed the 7-11 next door.
All I took was an Orange Crush
and a beef jerky. Didn’t take long.
I sat on the curb until the cops came—
was the best beef jerky cause I knew
I was comin back. This is home now.
I’m too old for the trains.
Here’s good.
Jan Beatty’s sixth book, The Body Wars, will be published in 2020 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is the winner of the Red Hen Nonfiction Award for her memoir, American Bastard, forthcoming in 2021. Her last book, Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, won the 2018 Paterson Prize.
Vibration
where I stand
everything is dead
and alive the massive tree, expired
sinks into the earth
like a person
returned to ashes and energy
pulling behind it
along with it
this dark clump of rock and root
and green leaves sprout
from a young, slender tree
which is uprooted too
suspended sideways
in mid air
like a balance beam
waiting for life to dance
along its splintered edge
everything is dead
and alive
a crumpled Bud Light can
half a plastic flower pot
a driver on the road below
an airplane overhead
a golfer on the green
the vibration of a sculpture garden
rusted and sharp angles
under blooms
Susan Lembo Balik is Director, Cultural Affairs at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ (home to the Poetry Center). Her first book of poetry is Sinatra, the Jeeperettes & me (Garden Oak Press, 2014), and her poems have appeared in Paterson Literary Review, San Diego Poetry Annual, Tiferet, and other journals.
The Bed in the Dining Room
The bed in the dining room was my father’s bed
placed there when he came home from the hospital.
No longer able to climb the stairs to their bedroom,
his left side paralyzed when they removed a tumor
from the right side of his 47 year old brain.
My mother had watched the surgery from a gallery,
much cruder in the early 1960s, as Dr. Winter probed
at points and asked my father, anesthetized but awake,
to tell him where he felt that touch “That’s my toes.”
or “The fingers on my left hand are tingling now.”
Our dining room table and chairs were moved out
and, with its maple leaves removed, it became
our kitchen table and chairs, big enough for four.
The dining room became not exactly a bedroom.
The metal hospital bed with cranks to raise and lower
head and feet, and a pole with rope and pulleys
to do my father’s physical therapy with the thought
that his ability to move arm and leg would return.
It never did. We lifted those dead limbs up and down
fighting gravity and atrophy, the wasting away,
this Darwinian descent of one man who knew
in his own evolution that they were becoming vestigial,
like wisdom teeth, appendix, tail bone, a father, son and husband.
Kenneth Ronkowitz is a lifelong educator. His poetry is anthologized in The Paradelle, The Practicing Poet and The Crafty Poet, and appears in English Journal, Tiferet, Lips, Paterson Literary Review and on The Writer’s Almanac. Since 1998, he has edited PoetsOnline.org.
Pink Light
for Kristina Branch
Tina, the light is pink, isn’t it?
The purple behind the gray,
I see it at twilight in Nice --- near
the carousel --- you asked me
what color the pavement was
and I knew --- and because you
spoke so highly of my eye,
today I saw pink light
and wanted to tell you,
wanted you to be beside me
driving down Park Street in
Montclair for the thousandth
time --- home from the headman
where every week, every month
I fight the desire not to look any more.
But I’d miss all the light. I’d miss you.
Linda Hillringhouse was a first-place winner of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award (2014) and second-place winner of Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry (2012). Her work has appeared in Lips; New Ohio Review; Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She has a book of poetry forthcoming in spring 2020.
Girlfriend
Cherry kept calling her my Girlfriend.
"Why was your Girlfriend yelling at you like that?"
I explained that she was not my girlfriend
though no explanation was really necessary.
She knew that Girlfriend or my girlfriend or
whatever or whoever was not actually..my
girlfriend. "And besides,she wasn't yelling".
At least, I didn't think she was yelling.
"Well, she was yelling," Cherry insisted..."and it was hurting my ears!"
"Well, I hadn't noticed," I told her while taking a deep breath
"Well, how could you not have noticed?" she further insisted
as she further queried..."Okay then" Cherry amended,
"Why was she barking at you like that?"
I didn't know if barking was an upgrade or a downgrade.
What did I know from yelling? And---
I didn't care!
It didn't matter!
Girlfriend could have.
If she'd wanted
Got All Up In My Face
If She'd Wanted.
I was not going to yell back. I
would have remained in a state of..whatever
state it was I was in at that point, as I was attempting to be
Charming, while not being obsequious.
I smiled and nodded and did everything short of
Batting my eyes at the woman.
It was a fine line I'd just ridden!!
Ridden it with An Applaudable Aplomb!
Cherry seemed to have no appreciation for the adroitness
and skill with which I'd just handled myself. And so,
"I guess she was yelling" I finally agreed
Because behind Her
FOUR LANES Of TRAFFIC WERE WHIZZING BY
AT THE FIFTY-FIVE MILES PER HOUR "Girlfriend" HAD INSISTED
I'D NOT BEEN GOING!
Girlfriend had not given me a Ticket!
And that's all that mattered.
Xandt Wyntreez's career is multi-faceted. He’s a professional Actor (Off-Broadway), Playwright & Screenwriter (TV). He’s been the Featured Poet at venues including Words on Wednesdays; The ANT & the NFSB ArtsGala in 2019. He debuted at the NY Poetry Festival in 2018. Xandt's poetry also appears in Lips.
From the Doorway of Bob and Ray’s Bar
Fogged wine and pilsner glasses hang
in near dark on either side of Rose,
who nods through Vern’s bullshit hero stories
while she towels around the well station
and square bins of crusted cherries, olives, and limes;
Delbert pulls with needle-nose pliers a clipper ship
and its Schmidt’s beer can sails into an empty
fifth of Jacquin’s gin; Ray carves a mallard
out of driftwood he caught crabbing in Cape May;
the Phils trail the Expos by three on a cater-cornered
black-and-white set with touch-and-go vertical hold;
a brick wall behind the bar that used to be a door;
the circular hole in the gold tin ceiling
where the stripper pole was; the unplugged
shufflepin game called Tic Tac Strike
that leads straight to the ladies room;
the dart board near the men’s where Vern
earned the bar its first league title with (no bullshit)
three bulls-eyes in his last four throws;
the line of yellow glow tape just past
the cigarette machine no kid was allowed to cross,
although he was allowed to buy smokes
for his parents after the corner stores closed,
to push in quarter after quarter until the lever freed
so he could pull it all the way back,
then release it like a pinball plunger to send
the pack shooting out, falling like a father to the floor.
Daniel Donaghy is a Professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University. His most recent collection of poems, Somerset, won the 2019 Paterson Poetry Prize. In 2019, he received an Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Office of the Arts.
A Lifetime in Five Minutes
My grandmother always said yes,
so grateful for the chance to escape
the confines of her narrow life.
Just let me get my purse.
Yes to the car wash, thrilled to watch
the beads of water pulled magically upward.
Yes to getting into a rowboat at 80,
joking that next she would try marijuana
and laughing so hard that the boat almost tipped.
Just give me five minutes when any of us
called and asked for a meal or a cafe con leche.
And like a little miracle she would present
her food to us, an omelette her offering,
or fluffy white rice with a mound of beans.
After my grandfather died she took her first
vacation and wore her first pair of pants on the plane.
I wonder how my grandmother endured her load
without complaint, remembering the strands of her stories,
that at ten her cousin Carmen kicked a nest of wasps
and my grandmother covered her cousin’s body,
saving Carmen’s sweet skin but almost losing her own.
The priest came to give last rites
At seventeen she arrived at the New York harbor
along with the Spanish flu.
She got deathly ill, received another visit
from a priest, escaped death’s grip again.
My grandmother spent the rest of her days
caring for others, suffering the wrath of her in-laws.
wheezing from asthma but still giving her love
to all of us, especially to me, the youngest of the lot.
The other morning, as I left the doctor, all I wanted
was to call my grandmother and ask her to make
me some breakfast.
Just give me five minutes, she would tell me.
Her kindness is my inheritance.
Lisa Coll Nicolaou is a writer who lives and teaches in New Jersey. For the past three years, Lisa has enjoyed her role as visiting poet in the Paterson Schools. Her poetry and prose have been published in a variety of journals. In 2016, she shared first prize in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest. Lisa is grateful for second chances.
Fruits of the Spirit
“…for as Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian scholar, asked of American Missionaries,
‘So long as this goes on in your land, do you think you have any Christianity to export?’”
— Robert Moats Miller
we stand underneath the large crabapple
tree in my grandparent’s front yard
this tree my seven-year-old self would climb
to pick the large, red, sour crabapples
which fascinated me because the fruit
was so sour it was inedible
I loved removing the stem that once held
the pome tightly tied to the bough above
I would hang upside down arms and legs wrapped
to see the light filtering through the leaves
my pockets full of fruit, I would climb down
to my waiting grandmother whose careful
support of each foothold on the slick bark
would keep me from swinging into the air
my southern baptist grandmother told me
her father took her to a lynching once
very close to where we were this minute
the man’s hands tied with rope behind his back
a piece of the same rope used for a noose
around his neck. What had he done? I asked.
she replied she was too young to recall.
it didn’t matter; he was a black man
she seemed upset by this recollection
like she wanted to provide a foothold
to prevent his swinging into the air
plug her once innocent ears from hearing
the crack of his neck, to look up and see
only light rays filtering through the leaves
Raymond P. Hammond is the editor-in-chief of both The New York Quarterly and NYQ Books. He holds an MA in English Literature from New York University and is the author of Poetic Amusement, a book of literary criticism. He lives in Beacon, NY with his wife, the poet Amanda J. Bradley, and their dog Hank.