Articles – Page 128 – Philadelphia Stories

Paper Wings

Icarus, sometimes I think we got it all wrong.
You weren’t the son of Titans, but the kid
in the back of the class, orphan to a
bright burning star,sticking your paper
wings together with glue
and chewing gum.
Kathryn A. Kopple is a translator of Latin American poetry and prose. Her translations have appeared in numerous reviews and anthologies. She has also published original work in Danse Macabre, The Hummingbird Review, and 322 Review. She has a poem titled "Sloth" forthcoming in The Threepenny Review. She lives and writes with her family in Philadelphia.

Bread, Milk

Picture beauty:
it’s not what you think,
but a day like this one:
round, tarnished

with the sadness
that just is.
Just is and no need to fix it.

Hard to accept,
how that isn’t cause for grief,

or reason to ignore dandelions
flourishing in a margin of sun
or fail to linger over
the existential plight
of clothespins on an empty line.

You may suspect at times
that this is all a shirt with three sleeves,
and contort yourself,
thinking there’s some obstacle between you and you.

The trick is just to wait
for life to spend you on the sly,
like a foreign penny
at the corner store
on something necessary.
Jeanne Obbard received a Leeway Award for Emerging Artists in 2001. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Anderbo, and the anthology Prompted.

Numbers: 1965

Castor Avenue was Jewish then
delis, yarmulkes,
old bearded men, two by two
arguing in Yiddish
bearing wrinkled gray suits
and soiled white shirts
to the cleaners where I worked
in my Catholic school uniform.
Wives in faded housedresses bore
pin-striped pants and cigar-scented
vests. And sometimes
forearms tattooed with
black numbers would slide
heavy woolen overcoats
across the formica counter, but
those numbers meant no more
to me than the tiny black numbers
on tags I pinned to their garments.
Kathleen Shaw grew up in Northeast Philly during the 1960s. For twenty years,
she has taught English at Montgomery County Community College in Pottstown.

The Poet on the Bus

Cake-walking down the sidewalk, a zaftig young woman
witnessing to whatever lyric is surging through her headphones,
carrying her away beside Broad Street, its flow of sinfulness.
Music is a manifestation of something that can be believed in.
Revelation is something that’s hard to keep to yourself. She is filled.
Maybe she is singing, but I’ve been deafened by glass
and she blinded by early-morning ecstasy – her left hand raised
and pulled back, raised again, the fingers of that hand opening
then closing as if breathing, or as if stretched up to a closet shelf,
grasping for something unseen, something lost, something that
belongs to her.
Steve Burke lives in the Mt Airy section of the city with wife Giselle & daughter Mariah; has worked as a labor & delivery nurse for many years; has been wiriting poetry much longer than that; and has been published in PBQ, Schuykill Valley Journal, Apiary, Mad Poets Review.

Excerpt from Report from the road to eudamonia

Postcard unto a sense of tribelessness

But nothing so stable as form-designated hue (especially which is no
hue at all) will account for the sudden ruddiness, china-blue and, a few
months each year, light-wheat-toast. Not to mention constellated with
the fat moles of my father’s side. And something of Albion in me, and
Westphalia, and a French monarch, and a Russian princess. There is
heritage to trace, per se, and leads from the fleshy part of the Michigan
mitten back East to where my mother’s people maybe actually thought
they’d discovered something New, and back again across the months
of the Atlantic, beyond the Channel deep into the Continent, to where
Caesar’s conquests once convinced bellicose and patriotic tribes to shake
hands and not hatchets. But the brittle tree I stenciled in Ms. Rae’s fourth-
grade class is diffuse, and describes not a uniform fondue but a stew of
only partially assimilated ante-states and when I am still I stand in the
middle of them all, no allegiance to speak of, no religion or tongue or
flag to bind me, a picture brought to focus by chance alignment of many
reckless stars and libidos.

Jacob A. Bennett lives and works in Philadelphia, where he teaches rhetoric, poetry, and literature. Links to CV, other poems, and various well-intentioned screeds published at: antigloss.wordpress.com

the neighbors, from Russia with love

i.
i wasn’t allowed to go in their house.
but my mom let me play in the yard
with their daughter.
ii.
Anastasya was my age and once,
she snuck me in.
her basement looked like mine
but in reverse,
like some alternate universe,
fun-house mirror.
it was dingier though,
and smelled like mildew.
iii.
they had a cat named Stinky
who once
climbed up our magnolia tree.
my dad cajoled him down.
Stinky seemed unwilling to return
to his owners:
he squirmed in revolt as we handed him back
to our stern Russian neighbor.
i don’t remember what he looked like.
the neighbor man, that is.
the cat was a Calico.
iv.
the Russian neighbors had chickens, once.
they plodded around in a small gated area of their backyard.
and one day,
the Russian man hung up dead fish on the clothing line,
like soaking wet pillowcases.
v.
Ruth, the Jewish old woman next door,
knocked on their door and said,
"the chickens and the dead fish? we don’t do that here in America."
Julia Perch is an editorial assistant by day, writer by night, and a literary geek at all times. She earned her B.A. in English from Drexel University, and currently lives and works in West Philly.

Light Against the Dark of the Café Windows

In the opposite corner – across the empty tables – is, I think,
Max, the young neighbor-man who when he was about two,
at our first block party after moving in, toddled away, and
was found at street’s end, where yellow tape kept traffic
from turning, by then-teenage Sherwood, dead six weeks after
arriving in Iraq, some five years past. Max is sitting on a bench
leaning over his laptop, maybe writing of why he ran away,
or of hearing adults recount it. Or maybe explaining why
Sherwood died. Explaining then deleting it. Behind the counter
barista Layney washes the evening cups and saucers in the steel sink;
night snug as the water on her forearms about this old brick station,
and no explanation, no explanation for anything at all.

Steve Burke lives in the Mt Airy section of the city with wife Giselle & daughter Mariah, has worked as a labor & delivery nurse for many years, has been writing poetry much longer than that, and has been published in PBQ, Schuykill Valley Journal, Apiary, Mad Poets Review.

Genre Crossing

This past spring, I signed up for a poetry class, and I did so with serious trepidation. As a fiction writer, I haven’t spent much time in the realm of poetry, though I did hang out with a few poets in grad school. As a lot, they were puzzling, prone to short outbursts of sudden conversational insight, as well as to leaving their thoughts half-finished–giving the listener the sense that what they said contained ellipses at the end…Overall, I found them to be, well, flakey. I figured that they perhaps had less stamina than fiction writers–that the best they could do was scribble one page of writing before being exhausted and intellectually spent–they were the sprinters, whereas fiction writers could go the distance, run the marathon. After taking the poetry class and seeing the work required to create a successful poem, I had a new sense of respect and awe for poets.

Also, let’s be honest, I didn’t “get” poetry; didn’t understand the mechanics of it, how a person came up with an idea, how to scan a line, what to do about rhyming (pro or con?). My brush with poetry was limited to high school English class and Walk Whitman’s "I Sing the Body Electric," which made me squirm with embarrassment, or Emily Dickinson’s one about the cracked cup, which seemed sad and totally like something a spinster would write. Aw, poor Emily! I thought. It wasn’t until I read e.e. cummings and Auden that I started to wonder if maybe I had been too dismissive of poetry. The only poem I’d ever written was in first grade for Mother’s Day:

Mom’s are neat

Mom’s are sweat (actual spelling error and/or sophisticated slant rhyme?)

Mom’s are nice

Mom’s are afraid of little white mice.

When I started this poetry class, I was terrified. Mostly, I feared appearing stupid during critiques. What if I accidentally faulted a poem for having sixteen lines or missed a pristine example of enjambment (I still don’t know what this word means)?

As in any good class, we began first by reading collections of poetry. To my relief, I discovered that some poets write in quick snapshot scenes, not unlike a highly condensed short story. They showed me it was okay to write a prose poem, focusing in on one particular thing and telling that story in a shorter form. I also rediscovered the importance of finding the right word. Since poetry is a concise, there’s less room to mess around. Every word, every image, every metaphor carries ten times more weight than it does in fiction. Nothing can be wasted.

I also found a sense of play in poetry that I’d lost in fiction and learned that the sound of words mattered too; they should go trippingly off the tongue. And then my favorite thing about writing a poem was the sense of satisfaction I received in being able to have a whole draft of something in one sitting. Even though I knew I would have to go back over it again and again,

I also discovered that there is poetry in everyday life. Contrary to my beliefs, I didn’t need to find something profound to say about life or death. Instead, I was encouraged to focus on the particular, what it feels like to sit in the chair at the dentist’s office, how I can best describe the splash of light coloring the morning sidewalk, the most apt simile to capture how the cat looks watching a daddy long legs crawl up the bedroom wall. Poetry reminded me that all of it matters. Realizing anew the importance of being exact has helped me improve my fiction writing on both a sentence level and overall.

So, whether you are a poet, an essayist, or a short story writer, consider venturing out of your genre and experimenting with a different form. You might find more than just a renewed appreciation of your fellow artist; you might also uncover a new way to enter into your own work.

Aimee LaBrie is an award-winning author and teaches a fiction workshop for Philadelphia Stories.

Dove Bar

“I see death’s door opening!”

That was my father’s greeting as I arrived at his room in Bryn Mawr Hospital after a frantic cross-country flight. My mother had tried to prepare me on the phone. She said, “The doctor says it’s kidney failure, and that it goes quickly. First, he’ll become euphoric, then disoriented, and then he’ll just … fall asleep.”

So this must be euphoria, I thought. “What does it look like, Dad?” I asked. But he just stared at me with an unnaturally bright, unfocused gaze, as if to say, “It’s a good opening line – and it’s all I got.”

That wasn’t unusual. Everyone knew that Jules Bogaev was a festival of one-liners. His explanation for why he, his brother and his father all became urologists: “Piss runs in the family.” His explanation for his infamously irascible bedside manner: “You know what? I hate people. But most of all, I hate sick people.” When patients called him at home he practically put them through a stand-up routine. “How’s your stream?” he’d yell down the line. “Did you void? Jesus Christ, I told you to void!”

Somehow, he made it through the office hours, the endless rounds, the seasonal spawn of new medical students at Jefferson Hospital, by telling stories. We referred to his stories as the Ten Greatest Hits, including “The Nurse Washing the Dead Man’s Socks” and “The Thumb Through the Heart.”

“There we are, four hours into an operation to repair a ruptured kidney, and the patient goes into cardiac arrest. Russell and I look at each other, he’s the chief surgeon and I’m assisting, and we’re both thinking the same thing. See, this guy is old, he’s 76, and he’s not going to make it. It’s not worth taking extreme measures; he’s too weak. But just as we’re about to take off our gloves, the intern, Patek, a really nervous type, pushes us aside, grabs a retractor, uses it like a mallet to crack open the sternum, and reaches in with his hands to manually massage the heart back into rhythm. That’s how we did it back then. But you see, the tissue was so old and decrepit; it was rotted through… like wet paper. So before you know it, his thumb goes right through the guy’s heart. Russell and I just stand there, dumbstruck, looking at each other and then down at our patient, now deceased. And then I point at Patek and yell, “Murderer! You killed him!”

My father would punctuate the last line by emphatically pointing his finger and stabbing the air, as if he were jabbing the invisible nervous intern in the chest.

“Thumb Through the Heart” was a real crowd pleaser at cocktail parties. He said it slayed his audience every time.

In the hospital, weakened by diabetes, kidney and heart failure, my father didn’t have the energy for reprisals of the Greatest Hits, but his wit never left him. For hours he would lie in bed, asleep, or appearing to sleep, and then suddenly his eyes would pop open, he’d raise his head and look around the room, as if he were checking to see which side of death’s door he had landed on. Once, when his gaze arrived at me, sitting by the bed, I said with my usual genius for stating the obvious, “Hi. I’m still here.” After a beat, he came back with, “The problem is, so am I.”

One afternoon the podiatrist came in to check out my father’s gangrenous toes. He was a young guy, nervous, like the intern of “Thumb Through the Heart”. He prescribed dialysis, explaining that my father might be able to avoid amputation if he arrested the kidney failure. But my father had no intention of arresting anything. The podiatrist looked shaken as he argued that he had patients much older, much worse off, much less alert, who did fine with dialysis. He had tears in his eyes as he pleaded his case. He asked, “What do you want, anyway? It’s only going to get worse. You could stop it here. For God’s sake, where do you see yourself in two weeks?”

My father replied, “Where do I see myself in two weeks? I’ll tell you where I see myself. I see myself in the crematorium.”

Damn, that was a good line.

On the fourth day of our bedside vigil, a nurse suggested that we offer our father something he really loved to eat, since it was likely he’d soon stop eating altogether. When my sister asked him what he’d like, he thought for a few moments, and then said, “I want a Dove Bar.” The diabetic wanted a Dove Bar. And my therapist sister, the former macrobiotic who lived for years on a diet of rice cakes and almond butter, grabbed her coat, dashed into a 7-Eleven for probably the first time in her life, and brought back the classic version, vanilla ice cream covered in rich, dark chocolate.

When I returned from lunch I found my father delicately wielding the heaviest known ice cream novelty bar; his thumb and forefinger grasping the wooden stick and his pinkie finger aloft. Earlier that day he hadn’t had the strength to hold his plastic cup of ice; we’d been shaking the chips into his mouth. Now, not only did he eat nearly the whole thing, he ate it without getting a spot on him. He ate that bar with surgical precision, with complete control, even with a touch of dramatic flair. Perhaps it crossed his mind that “The Dove Bar” might end up on another Top Ten list of family stories. After all, he hadn’t come out with any deathbed confessions, or any long-withheld revelations of any kind. Instead, the stories of “The Dove Bar” and “The Nervous Podiatrist” could be his legacy to us.

He died two days later, in the middle of the night, alone.

After the hospital called, I thought about animals, how they go off and hide when they’re dying. But my father didn’t hide. I imagine for him it was more a matter of the rightness of things, of allowing himself to exit the stage only after the audience had left the theater, the lights had dimmed, and the cleaning crew had made its late night rounds.

The day of the Dove Bar incident, after my father had finished his last earthly meal, hand-delivered by his oldest daughter, and had then sunk back on the pillows to sleep off the glucose payload, I had the urge to leap up, point at my sister, and yell, “Murderer! You killed him!”

She wouldn’t have thought it was funny, so I didn’t do it. But I wish I had. I’m sure our father would have appreciated it. I’m sure, even in his deep, nearly final sleep, it would have cracked him up. I would have slayed with that one.

Barbara Bogaev is the host of "Soundprint," public radio’s national weekly documentary program. In more than twenty years in broadcasting, Bogaev has interviewed rock stars and war correspondents for NPR’s "Fresh Air with Terry Gross," talked with poet laureates and conscientious objectors for American Public Media’s "Weekend America," and hosted and produced science, news and arts programming for NPR member-stations WHYY and WXPN. A Philadelphia native, she began her radio career as the producer of the award-winning talk show, "Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane." She blogs at alwaysmorequestions.com.

Red Eye

This is her second trip to Kiev, with its challenge of teaching computer programming through translators. She sits in seat 16G of the Boeing 767, the window, and pulls out a Jodi Picoult novel she picked up in the airport. Passengers file by and she gets her hopes up that the seat next to her might be empty, give her room to stretch out. But then a decent looking man, forty-fiveish, nods at her, puts his carry-on in the overhead and sits in 16F. She discreetly eyes his spread, as she calls it; she hates passengers who ooze onto her side of the arm rest. He is thinnish and self-contained. She is relieved.

Three hours into the red-eye, most of the cabin lights are out, passengers asleep. 16F reaches up to turn off his light, pulls the blanket up to his neck, leans his head back, closes his eyes. She has trouble sleeping on night flights and has developed a routine. She asks the flight attendant for some herbal tea, sips the tea to empty, quietly crushes the cup and slips it into the magazine sleeve. 16F is breathing deeply, slowly–how do people fall asleep so quickly? Now she places her two right fingers over the crease in her left wrist– the Spirit Gate of acupuncture, the path to sleep, according to one of her Chinese friends– and applies pressure.

About an hour later—it could have been longer, or shorter—she wakes up, feeling a weight on her left shoulder. It’s the head of 16F, sound asleep. She surveys the invisible vertical shield between their seats—yes, he is definitely on her side. She feels invaded, almost repulsed. Excuse me, she starts to say, and her shoulder tenses as if preparing to toss him off.

At thirty-six she has never had a man fall asleep with his head on her shoulder. She has never been touched before. Not like that. Not by a man. Or a woman. It’s not that she’s untouchable, no one specific thing has taken her out of contention. A bit stocky, though not a candidate for Weight Watchers, with a friendly smile that would benefit from braces. Unpocked skin discretely made up. She dresses decently, not the epitome of style, but thoughtfully and professionally. Plain, is what her mother had called her. Has a good job that takes her traveling. Is a voracious reader. Has friends, mostly women, all of whom she knows have slept with someone, will sleep with someone. Friends who never talk about their sex lives when she is around. She accepts her life without sex, you can’t always get what you want. People learn to live with the cards that are dealt them—limited intelligence, or a suicide in the family, or dreams after a war. Not that she feels like a survivor of something; she just knows that no one will want to sleep with her. Work, friends, books, travel: it could be worse. And it’s hard to miss what you have never had, so unknown.

His head seems so light. It reminds her of her one-year-old niece, who she baby-sits and rocks to sleep, head tucked in the nape of her neck. She prepares to reach over and tap him on his arm, excuse me, but you fell asleep. This man’s head on her shoulder, so light, breathing quietly in the dark cabin. Her breath falls in step with his. So. This is what it’s like. Not yet, no need to wake him, no hurry to do that. She closes her eyes and lets her head lay back on the seat, feels the lightness of his head. She has an urge to touch his face, just brush it with the back of her hand; but no. She closes her eyes, tries to sleep, but is unable to. Slowly, her head fills with images: of her hand going under his blanket, finding the V in his legs, un-zipping in the dark, his hand finding her. She holds her breath, trying to feel that, and realizes that this is beyond her imagination. But this head sinking into her shoulder now, this is real. She inhales, seeking an odor, something more of him. Yes, some kind of aftershave, maybe a little musk gathered since his shower this morning. She feels a slight dampness seeping through the upper sleeve of her blouse. So: sleeping men sometimes drool, like babies. She closes her eyes and sleeps. Every few minutes she awakes, the head still on her shoulder, the wonder of it; then falls back to sleep; then awakes. So light. The wonder of it.

Six a.m., the lights come on in the cabin, the captain announces they will be landing in forty-five minutes. 16F stirs, rubs his eyes, realizes he has been sleeping on her shoulder. I’m terribly sorry, he says, I hope I didn’t bother you, have I been on your shoulder a long time?

Not to worry, she says, not too long.

Did I snore?

No, no snoring.

Whew, he says, it could have been worse.

It was, she says.

How so?

You drooled.

Drooled? Oh no!

Just like a baby.

Like a baby? he says. He glances at her shoulder, takes a napkin and reaches over as if he is going to dry her sleeve. The flight attendant comes down the aisle, passing out hot towels and coffee. 16F holds the towel to his face, turns to her, I’m really sorry. She likes that his teeth are slightly crooked.

No, really, she says, it’s fine.

On the other side of the whirring carousel regurgitating luggage she sees him, waiting for his bags. He has collected one piece, there must be more. He picks up a small second bag, puts the strap over his shoulder. She wants him to look across the carousel, just nod. He looks at his watch, then turns and heads toward the ground transportation sign.

Her right hand reaches over and feels for the dampness on her sleeve.

Mark Lyons has lived in Philadelphia for the last forty years. His fiction has been published in numerous journals and was a part of the "Reading Aloud" series at Interact Theater. He also authored Espejos y Ventanas/Mirrors and Windows, Oral Histories Of Mexican Farmworkers and Their Familes. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and awarded Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in literature in 2003 and 2009. Currently, Mark is co-director of the Philadelphia Storytelling Project, which works in the immigrant community and with high school students to teach them to create digital stories about their lives.