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Homecoming

Harry is home now. He slipped in on a perfect spring afternoon while hundreds of thin yellow ribbons fluttered like tinsel on the Japanese maple. He didn’t want any fuss, so he and his family spent the rest of the day quietly at home.

He is twenty years old and he has killed since I saw him last. On Christmas morning, he returned Iraqi fire to save his own life and continue with the job he was sent to do.

When I learned that Harry had shipped out to Iraq last year, I set out an American flag and wrapped a yellow ribbon around my poplar tree. I am not given to public acts of patriotism. I’ve always considered the ribbon thing a little hokey. Harry’s going changed that. Sure, I didn’t enlist and I didn’t demonstrate about the war. I continued my life and my work as a psychologist in personal safety and freedom here. But I woke up. The spin and political posturing that obscure the realities of war faded.

Thirty years ago, those distractions had shielded me from the Vietnam War. I was able, then, to know and at the same time not know about napalm and daily death tolls and my contemporaries who came home broken or not at all. I voted on election days and did nothing else but complain and resent the government. I played the part of not playing a part.

War is horrible and magnificent in its ability to engage and alter human consciousness. In psychology, we call such forces of nature archetypes and they are impulses that emerge from the deepest levels of our humanity. In the grip of an archetype, we feel possessed. Rationality yields. We fall in love, explode into rage, and descend into depression; we’re blinded by lust, mesmerized by religious zeal, driven to preserve life or destroy it.

War is like that; it sweeps us away. War triggers the most destructive and the most tender moments in a country’s life. We’re all drawn in, one way or the other.

When Harry shipped out, I experienced urgent feelings of empathy and solidarity. I didn’t intend to tie a ribbon around the tree. It was a blind reflexive gesture in the way that machine gun fire at close range is reflexive. I found myself doing it. I began thinking not about whether this war is right or wrong but simply about war and my place in it. And I identified venues for my involvement.

It doesn’t matter that I don’t really know Harry. We keep to ourselves in our neighborhood in a friendly sort of way. That young man and I lead such different lives, we’d never had reason to converse. He drives a Mustang, I drive a Volvo. He goes out after ten at night when I am anticipating a good book and an easing into sleep. He plays music on his car radio I know nothing about. None of that mattered. I got in the habit of holding my breath when morning radio reported the news from Iraq. I don’t know how the family stood the steady news of casualties and deaths.

The Sunday afternoon of his homecoming was soft and breezy, warm and grateful, the way an afternoon in early spring can be: triumphant, full of birdsong and the motion of yellow ribbons.

I tried to keep at the project I’d been working on but I felt agitated and distracted, not exactly excited but moved and drawn. I realized I had to do something. I wanted to say, "Welcome home,” to offer a gift that would help draw him back from the war.

I found myself stepping into the garden where the first wave of daffodils nodded. I cut a fat bunch, tied the moist green stems in streaming yellow ribbon and walked down the street to my neighbor’s house. I rang the bell and waited. When the door opened, there was Harry, still in uniform. He was finishing a conversation with someone inside and was in the process of turning toward me so I had a few seconds to take him in before our eyes met.

His drab green fatigues collided with the afternoon and gave the impression that he was sealed off. His form looked almost hazy, indistinct. He began to focus on me with a slow and deliberate gaze. I could see him in the process of coming home, cautiously, layer by layer, shedding the dust and dryness and danger.

I handed him the bouquet of yellow daffodils.

"I’ll bet you haven’t seen anything like these for a while," I said.

He looked down at them.

"No,” he said. “You’re right. I haven’t."

There was a beat of silence. I said something inane about how glad we all were that he had gotten home in one piece.

"Me too," he said.

Another beat of silence.

He looked intently into the creamy yellow flowers and then back to me.

"Thank you for this."

“You’re more than welcome.”

I turned and started for home. War, as they say, is fought “on the ground,” in the moment. Its violence and terror concentrate in war zones but its energy and effects exist everywhere. In budding gardens and chilly subways, in precisely appointed corporate offices and in the lives of returning soldiers. To pretend it isn’t happening or that it is contained far away is a fool’s game.

During periods when this archetypal force has been loosed in the world, I have hidden behind ideology or simply tried to ignore it. Now, being on the ground with it, in my own small ways, disturbs me but also enlivens me.Emma Mellon grew up in Southwest Philadelphia near Cobbs Creek Park though she was not allowed to play in the park unsupervised. She graduated from Temple University, moved to Washington DC to teach Language Arts in a private school and then returned and earned a PhD at Temple. She is a licensed psychologist in private practice and an author of non-fiction and poetry. Her work has been published in The Inquirer and The Daily News. Her essay, “Christmas with TwylaRose” will appear in the forthcoming Chicken Soup for the Soul Celebrates Dogs available in October 2004.

Not Tony and Tina

 [img_assist|nid=4361|title=Hair Drawing, Simona Mihaela Josan © 2004|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=151]My mother wishes for me: I wish you’d cut your hair short. I wish you had some security. I wish you’d write about real Italians. That wish came on a rainy spring Sunday after she and my father had spent the previous evening attending the decade-old play-in-a-restaurant, "Tony and Tina’s Wedding."

"Your cousin didn’t like it either. And your father —" she batted the air, "Well, nothing bothers your father."

Not true, of course. Wool bothers my father, wool and the entire sad history of mankind and any and all humiliations to the human spirit big or small. Earlier, he’d stood in my living room contemplating the rose window in the church across the street. Then he turned toward us slowly, looking as though he’d just had a long talk with God, and announced that he wasn’t coming with us to the annual Philadelphia Flower Show.

He wanted to watch a golf tournament. We left him in the company of Tiger Woods. By then it was raining heavily. I kept my eyes on the streets, trying to avoid the pot holes, while she, waiting for my corroborating outrage, continued to describe the play.

"It’s a satire, Mom.”

"It was mean," she said. I let that one pass. Given her exasperation, it was not the time to lecture her on the properties of satire.

"When did you ever go to a wedding in our family where they served a piece of meat meatballs hard as a rock—instead of salmon or even just a nice chicken? And when was the last time you ever saw anybody dance on a table with her—all of her top was hanging out! The clothes were awful and the language. This we paid $75.00 for? No one in our family acts like that."

No one in our family acts like that. My mother had been seduced into believing that those characters were badly-behaved members of our own family. She loved being an Italian-American. Tony and Tina had embarrassed her.

"And you," she said.

"Me? What me?"

"You should do something about it."

The parking attendant was waving and flailing at me. Lot full. I backed out onto the street. "Like what?"

"Write something good."

"Aren’t I writing a novel?"

"Is it Italian?"

I had been keeping my own counsel with this third novel because there were Italian-Americans in the work. Until now, I’d never mined the depths of my Italian-American experience, mostly because I didn’t think there was one.

My mother was already convinced she was the mother in two previous novels (women to whom she bears no resemblance, both of whom I’d killed off in violent ways). How could I tell her that I planned to showcase her in the new book? So far the writing had made me sleepy with guilt. Each time I shot an arrow aimed at the bull’s eye authentic, I hit caricature.

We found a parking space two blocks away, then linked arms under a single umbrella and ran to the convention center, where we were cast into yet another ethnic wonderland: France. Amid the lush floral displays stood a mini Eiffel Tower; a Parisian cafe; a repro Tuileries. Geraniums, blistering red and swollen, spilled out of glazed pottery. There was even a reconstructed Japanese bridge against a canvas backdrop of Monet’s garden at Giverney. Years before I’d been to Giverney and had stood on the real bridge looking out over Monet’s pond.

My father was stationed in France after World War II. For decades I’ve been running with the joke that my parents named me Denise because my father—who chose the name—was secretly fascinated with a French chanteuse named Denise. I’ve invented his French experience as romantic, clothed him in fluid gabardine instead of army fatigues, added an unrequited love to his post-war France. I wanted to account for being a Denise in a family of Joes and Marys. I wanted a reason. So I made one up.

That day at the flower show I said, "It doesn’t look like this."

But my mother was thrilled, believing she was a guest at Monet’s home. Should it matter then that the play had depicted Italians as lewd, gauche, dumb? Wasn’t it all invention? This garden in a convention center? Those actors in a wedding? My mother didn’t think so.

She believed that somewhere between depictions of Italians exerting brute force, wearing bad clothes and making wise-cracks, there had to be another portrait.

As we sampled bistro food under a striped cafe awning I began to feel shame—not for what I was, but for my obsessive efforts to banish all traces of it. I hid my maiden name: Piccoli. Gess, my married name, was short, sweet. What I’d barely admitted to myself was how much I loved its Anglo-Saxoness. I was a coward. I never wanted anyone confusing me with those other Italians.

“Where are the Italian-American writers?” Gay Talese had asked in an essay for the Times. Why so mute? Well, Italians don’t grow up with books in their houses, he pointed out. There were books in my home and magazines, yet nothing that resembled a library. I wasn’t read to as a child—I was talked to. I grew up in a family where everyone thought it was their obligation to articulate their raw emotions as if they were splinters that needed to be tended to immediately. The entire range of emotion was accessible by asking, "How do you feel?"

"Sit down and I’ll tell you."

Seated around a table with relatives is how I learned story. Sometimes the stories were funny and sometimes they were somber, but my mother was right: they were not stupid, brutish, or lewd.

After we’d had our fill of croissants and espresso, we linked arms and left the convention center. The rain and wind had died out. The sky was opaque gray.

"Italians bleed together like cheap madras," I said.

"That’s true," my mother said. She shrugged. I watched the sharp planes of her face shifting. "I’m not educated like you and your brother and your sister, but I know when somebody’s making fun of me."

On the subject of my intense family ties I’ve been from A to Z and back again, as torn up as a dirt road after a drag race when I examine their blunders, their open-hearted messiness.

"Be funny," she said, "but tell a whole story."

Hadn’t she, my first reader, always offered herself up for scrutiny? That day she was asking me to give something back, something more complex than stereotypes: real Italians.

"I’ll give it a shot," I told her.Denise Gess is the author of two critically-acclaimed novels, Good Deeds (1984) and Red Whiskey Blues (1989) and the co-author of the non-fiction book Firestorm At Peshtigo: A Town, Its People and The Deadliest Fire in American History (2002). Her short fiction has appeared in the North American Review and has been anthologized in The Horizon Reader. She’s working on a collection of essays entitled Bad For Boys.

Among Poets

A sixteen-foot blowfish stuck her spiny yellow claws into my arm
Then planted her fuschia balloon lips on my chest

The shiny seven-foot dolphin offered a smoke.

Through gray-green dune grass and sprays of cold salt
I had plunged, faithless, into the sea.

Called down,
Away from the anesthesia of oxygen,
To breathe through water and call it home.

My virgin voyage to Poesy

Where nobody has a mother.

Local Author Profile: Lisa Scottoline

Killer Smile, Lisa Scottoline’s eleventh novel, has already been chosen as Main Selections by both Literary Guild and Mystery Guild. It will also be featured in Doubleday Book Club, Quality Paperback and Book of the Month Club. Philadelphia Stories talked with Lisa about her life as a writer, and what it means to be a writer from Philadelphia.

What was the inspiration for your latest crime novel?
My inspiration for Killer Smile came when my father, who was terminally ill, called me over. He said he had two important things to give me. One was the deed to the family cemetery plot, and the other he said was the last of the family secrets. He handed me two booklets covered in pink paper. They turned out to be my grandparents’ alien registration cards. It was then that I learned an important piece of U.S. history, and a very personal piece of my own family history.

During WWII, as many as 600,000 Italian Americans were forced to register as enemy aliens, and thousands more were relocated, and even interned. In Killer Smile, lawyer Mary DiNunzio sets out to get reparations for Amadeo Brandolini, an Italian American who committed suicide while interned during World War II. Mary discovers that Brandolini did not actually commit suicide, and she is determined to find justice for him.

Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process?
The truth is that I don’t write with an outline. When I have an idea, which is only once a year, I go ahead and write it. I let the story develop as I write it. Even I am not always sure which direction it will take.

Did you always want to write?
No, I loved Perry Mason, and always wanted to be a lawyer. I practiced law for several years, but at the same time I was a bookaholic. Eventually I traded one passion for another.

How did you become a professional writer?
I was working as a litigator at one of Philly’s most prestigious law firms, when the birth of my daughter coincided with a divorce. I wanted to stay home to raise my daughter, but still needed a way to pay the mortgage. At the time, Grisham and Turow had come on to the scene, and it occurred to me that there was no one writing from the female perspective. I lived off credit cards for several years, and wrote while my daughter slept (which wasn’t much). I had finally just taken a part-time job as a law clerk when my first book, Everywhere That Mary Went sold to HarperCollins.

How does the Philadelphia area influence your writing?
All my books are set in Philly. I love Philly for its neighborhoods, dialects and heavy dose of reality, and thought it would be terrific to put it on the literary map. The law was also born in Philly, so what better place to set legal fiction books?

Can you offer any advice to young writers?
Just to go for it! I believe everyone has a story in them, and they should never be discouraged to put it on paper.

Pierce Street

I first see the cat on my way out to the Super Fresh to pick up Portobello mushrooms. He’s lying on the other side of our one-way street, a single lane narrow enough to be an alley really, a place where he never would have lain normally, smart stray that he was. I didn’t look for long, only enough to confirm that his body had been crushed, though not which part, to acknowledge the red pool spreading slowly beneath him, the flies already buzzing inside the mouth that the car wheel had forced open.

I look up and down Pierce Street and see that I’m alone. There’s no one around to fill me in on what happened, no one but me and this dead cat. It’s a hazy summer night in South Philadelphia. Air conditioning units whir from first and second floor windows. It isn’t much of a decision, really. I’m strapped for time, with a friend due to arrive for dinner and my new backyard grill not even fired. I keep moving, toward my Nissan, which beeps cheerfully when I aim the keyless remote toward it.

I squeeze my car around the cat, turn the corner and wave to the two old ladies sitting on beach chairs in the next alley. They smile and wave back. We’ve been on better terms lately. Our relationship, which even now consists solely of smiling and waving, has evolved slowly. At first they were content to stare as I drove past them on my way out for the evening. I forced the issue, though, making eye contact and waving when I was in a good mood and staring straight ahead when I wasn’t. The inconsistent approach didn’t exactly loosen them up, but now we have the routine down: I nod and smile, they smile and wave.

This brief interaction doesn’t help my mood, though. I make my way through a grid of streets in the gray summer night, pondering the reality of my neighborhood, a place where cats are hit by cars that keep driving. Where a friend of mine called the morning after my housewarming party, insisting that I move immediately after she had witnessed a gang of kids beat up another kid over on Washington Avenue on her way home. Where the people next door, a family that I knew would be trouble not long after I had moved in, once put a bullet through the center of my front picture window.

I was out for the night, having dinner at my parents’ house south of the city, in the now-suburban countryside where I grew up. It was dusk when I returned to find police tape separating my row house and the one next to it from the small crowd that had gathered. A group of women and children, some whom I vaguely recognized, pointed me toward the cop who stood nearby guarding the crime scene.

I didn’t ask for an explanation and the cop didn’t provide one, although I heard the story plenty of times in the weeks to come from Norman, the boy who knows everything there is to know about what goes on around Pierce Street. His face would light up and his glasses flash as he recreated the scene, the domestic dispute that erupted in the house next to mine and spilled out into the street. How the old lady’s son went after the guy nobody had ever seen before, how everybody scattered — adults, kids, everybody, including Norman — when the old lady gave the gun to her dear boy so he could start shooting. He didn’t get the guy, Norman said, his narrative slowing in disappointment. But I should have seen how the cops came running, he said, speaking breathlessly again. They must have been right up the street to get here so fast after everybody started using their cell phones to call 911!

At first the cop wouldn’t let me past the tape, but he changed his mind after a few minutes, with a warning not to touch anything until the detectives showed up. As I unlocked my front door, I took a closer look at the window. The hole the bullet had made was small and perfect, except for single cracks on each side that extended from the hole to the frame, like blood vessels in the eye of someone who is tired or stoned.

Inside, I turned on the light next to my sofa. Everything in the living room looked as I had left it, except for the tiny shards of glass on the stereo and carpet, and the hole the streaking bullet had made in my ceiling. I looked at the one in the window and the one in the ceiling and made a quick calculation: even if I had been standing right in front of the window, watching the fireworks, I wouldn’t have gotten hit. A broom that wasn’t mine was lying out on the patio, a stray projectile from the earlier rounds of the fight next door.

Later, I sat on the sofa watching the NBA Finals, as a detective stood on the chair I had lent him and poked a thin metal rod with a circular catch into my ceiling.

“Who’s up?” he asked.

“ Lakers by ten. Third quarter.”

“ Looks like their year again, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Too bad.” He nodded, concentrating on extracting the bullet. “Having any luck?”

“Nope,” he said, grunting as he stepped down from the chair. “That’s okay. We’ll have enough to nail him without it. Better call your landlord. Give him this when you see him,” he said, handing me his card.

[break]

The cat is still lying there when I get home. The street still seems deserted, but then I see Bobbie peering out her screen door and shaking her head. She looks distressed. I don’t know her well but I like her. Her face, perpetually tanned, is weathered enough to suggest someone in her late forties. Childless, she and her husband live in the house directly across from mine. Every night she spends ten minutes with the hose watering the plants on the sidewalk, a lit cigarette dangling from her lower lip. Her garden is a dazzling array of color, all in ceramic pots, and the only sign of natural life on Pierce Street. She smiled and said she would help when I told her I intended to start my own right across from her, but that was a few weeks ago and the last time we spoke.

“I’ll go get a box,” I tell her.

Her expression changes from one of concern to one of resolve. “I’ve got one,” she

says.

“Then I’ll go get gloves.”

She lines a cardboard box from her SUV with a green trash bag and gives it to me. I find that the only way to pick the cat up is to not think about it too deeply, not speculate on the life it might have led, a life I never considered that often on my way to and from my car every day. This must be the attitude anyone must have who confronts what violence does to the flesh for a living, I tell myself. The head sags and the flies scatter as I wrap my hands around the broken body, the blood smearing against the dried soil of my gardening gloves. Bobbie grabs her hose and aims a jet stream at the small pool still in the street. I hold on to the box, unsure of what to do with it, deciding finally to put it on the sidewalk in front of the house where the cat was hit.

Just then Milanya comes out. I have been wondering where she’s been. It is she who has been putting out the styrofoam bowls of dry food that were eaten every day by this stray and two others. Her attempt to domesticate one of the others, a feral kitten that I once found curled up on my doormat as I left for work on one of the coldest mornings of the year, has become a mini-drama recently. So far her efforts to catch Buster and take him to an animal hospital have been unsuccessful. She had gotten as far as coaxing him onto her lap, but last week I came out to find her sitting on a nearby stoop, sobbing, three fresh scratches running up the inside of her arm. Buster stared at her from the other side of a locked gate that protected his alley. She wasn’t crying from the pain, Milanya explained, but for all the days it would take to earn the cat’s trust again. So far she has ignored my sister, a lab tech at a veterinary hospital whose advice I solicited, about getting a cat trap instead.

When she sees the box and realizes what’s inside, she throws up her hands and paces back and forth, not sure what to do with herself. For someone in his late thirties, I feel like I’ve had surprisingly little experience consoling others after a loss. I can see, though, that it doesn’t require much practice: assume what you hope is a sympathetic expression, and nod with conviction at everything the mourner says, whether you agree with it or not. Keep controversial opinions, like your feelings about whether or not one should feed stray cats to begin with, to yourself.

“Who the hell could run over a cat like that and just leave it to die in the street?” Milanya asks. “And I’m sorry, but he’d have to be driving pretty damn fast to hit one in the first place.” While I agree with the first comment and act like I do for the second, I find that I have a hard time empathizing with Milanya’s hysteria. She is choosing to see what has happened as a crime against the cat. And in one way, I agree. All this just confirms something I don’t like about my neighborhood, reinforces my belief that ultimately I’ll never stay, will live here for now because the rent is cheap and the location convenient, but never buy, something that separates me from Milanya and Bobbie and most of the other residents on Pierce Street. But in another**, the cat’s death is just the law of averages kicking in, a probability that Milanya, through her daily bowls of cat food, inadvertently increased. **Not clear; maybe “But in another way,…”

She goes inside to see about having the cat cremated (“My God, we have to do something, we can’t just throw her in the trash!”). I’m about to as well – I’m wasting time and my friend should be arriving any minute now – when Lisa opens the screen door next to mine and says hello. She and her husband Mark moved in after the gunslingers left and the landlord gutted and renovated the place. He works in pharmaceuticals outside the city; she is five months pregnant with their first child. They’re a nice couple and a sign that gentrification, for better or worse, may finally be arriving here on Pierce Street.

We strike up a conversation about my job. She knows from some previous exchanges that I’m an English teacher, and asks me if I know someone she once had in high school, a Catholic parochial school for girls not far from our neighborhood. I don’t know the guy, explaining that private schools like mine don’t interact much with the archdiocesan ones.

“Was he a good teacher?” I ask.

“Oh yeah, he was great. I had him for AP English. He’s taught there for like 35 years.”

“It’s great to have one who really mattered, huh?”

“Oh yeah. He was like, the only good thing about that place.” She smiles when she says this, although the pain of the memory breaks in on the innocence of the smile.

“So what else is going on?” she asks.

“Oh, not much … oh, well, actually, it’s too bad, one of those stray cats just got hit by a car.” I try to adjust my tone to something more serious but it’s too late. Lisa’s face goes blank with confusion. Just then Milanya comes back out, still beside herself.

“Milanya?” she asks. “Which one?”

“Muggsy,” Milanya answers, wiping her eyes. “The one you were worried about.”

“Is he?” Lisa’s eyes darken and soften as she begins to comprehend. “Will you excuse me?” she asks, not really conscious of who I am anymore.

I can’t make out the muffled words behind her front door as she tells her husband the news, but I can hear clearly what comes after that: the sounds of her sobbing uncontrollably. Mark comes out a minute later. “I’ve never seen her so upset,” he says quietly, lighting a cigarette, and I nod with real empathy this time, keeping to myself the unexpected gratitude I feel for the high-pitched gasps I can still hear inside. Someone is doing what none of us had been capable of on this hot July night in the city. Someone is grieving at last.

Matthew Jordan grew up in Delaware County and now lives in South Philadelphia. A graduate of Albright College in Reading, PA and the University of Pennsylvania, he is finishing a Master?s program in English and Creative Writing at Rutgers-Camden. He teaches literature and writing at a private high school in Bucks County.

Waiting

We sit in an airless room surrounded by windows
Blue-black sky, towering neighbors
Wheelchair heaven.

You describe your dream:
Recurring images of chemo-stallions racing across your night sky
Towing starched lines that abruptly plunge to earth.

Lilacs hang daintily on the shower-rings of
New age transfusions,
Shamelessly spilling the scent of spring.

You take an old picture frame,
Plucked from the attic of your mind
And work to bring it all together.
It doesn’t fit.

Smell the lilacs
Feel the power of the stallion’s haunches
See the blue, blue sky without interpretation.

Enjoy this day, this view.
It is all you.

 

Tourette Poem #14

I’ve burdened my son with this now.
He misses strides, kisses the silence,
twists himself into a wretched mess.

A guest in his own body,
he is uncomfortable with the gaze
of strangers.

Too young to be so cautious,
too innocent to grapple with the whims
of that body gone haywire,

he stands at the edge of a narrow morning,
hoping that what is his prison
will someday be his palace.

“Daddy,” he said, “what disguise
do you wear to fool yourself?” or

“Can you taste on your tongue
the slow way mountains move?”

 

Anthony DiFiore has been writing poetry for thirty years. For the last several years he has been writing poems about Tourette’s and the Bible. Currently, he manages a thrift store that uses its profits to aid abused women and their children.

The Piano Chord Most Adjacent to the Inexpressible

The piano chord most adjacent to the inexpressible is the
one that dissolves into flocks of flying birds

The tree as it moves through the breeze most
adjacent to conducting the sonorous
filaments of the air stands as tall as a
doorman to an entranceway to the eternal mysteries

The desert most adjacent to spiritual enlightenment is the
one whose dunes yesterday don’t resemble its
dunes today and whose dunes today
have slopes and dips totally ocean-like and unlike any of its
dunes tomorrow

The rain is finally falling after a month of drought
little earth-lips opening to drink in each drop
and the song each water-drinking element sings
resembles the chorus of an ancient opera sung among
cataclysmic rocks above tumultuous seas

There are no people in this poem
they are either asleep or haven’t been born yet
but the sound in the landscape most adjacent to the
deep heartfelt human voice
is the night-cricket seeming to long for a mate wherever
it may happen to hear its lament repeated
incessantly but melodiously through the dark

So like us
in catastrophe or anti-catastrophe
calling out to space from our centrifugal loneliness
with a voice most adjacent to the
silent nuzzling feeler to feeler of ants meeting from
opposite directions
and lights beaming from north and south and brightly
blending somewhere over the
Arctic in a purple and scarlet shivering aurora borealis
whose ripples are most adjacent to the
music of the spheres hanging down into the
visible from the invisible heavens whose
radiant flowing draperies curving through the folding air
they are

 

Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore was born in 1940 in Oakland, California. His first book of poems, Dawn Visions, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books, San Francisco, in 1964. He became a Muslim/Sufi in 1970, performed the Hajj in 1972, and lived in Morocco, Spain, Algeria and Nigeria. In 1996 he published The Ramadan Sonnets, and in 2001 a new book of poems, The Blind Beekeeper.

The Decade I Longed To Be Grown

I wanted to talk jive.
I wanted to be funky
like the white boy who sang
psychedelic slang
& give birth
to a new dance trend
called disco.

I wanted to be
a kaleidoscope
big as an afro-shaped-globe,
spinning my own tempo
under black light dust.
I’d be a lava-lamp chick
— stone-cold bumping
my have-mercy hips—
& do the hustle
in mommy’s platform heels.

I wanted to be cool.
I wanted to cruise
with my own fly-dude
& steer
the turntable wheels.
We’d groove
What’s Going On?
in daddy’s brown El Camino,
pose mean gangsta leans
in neon-fur-smothered-bucket-seats,
& watch

Lucy’s Sky Diamonds
dangle & dance
like brilliant erotic dice.

 

Penny Dickerson is a 1988 graduate of Temple University where she earned a B.A. degree in Journalism and is currently a M.F.A. candidate in the Lesley University Creative Writing Program (Low Residency) in Cambridge, Mass. (Graduation: January 2005). She has additionally taken a continuing education poetry writing course at University of the Arts under the tutelage of Donna Wolf-Palacio and was once a “Suppose an Eye” participant at the Kelly Writer’s House and looks forward to her parenting scheduling and graduate school time to allowing her to come back. Previous poetry works and journalism have been published in the anthology, Azure and Amber, the Florida Times-Union and her poem, “A Conscious Statement” won first place winner in the Ritz Theatre’s poetry contest in Jacksonville, Florida. Penny will serve as Poet-in-Residence at Andrew Jackson Elementary School (K-8), this fall as a final graduation interdisciplinary project.

Spring

Aunt Ginny is up in her Cessna
Navigating circles and dips
Swooping in the sun

Uncle Jack is on the porch
Smoking dope and thinking
This getting old’s a bitch
When you’re sick

He faces the sky and
Looks for Aunt Ginny
They had a tough winter with his cancer
And weather so bad she couldn’t fly

But it’s spring now
And things are good
Uncle Jack rocks
Smokes dope
And plans
Thinking:
The sun is strong
The flowers are sweet
Maybe I’ll eat lunch today
If that’s stronger than the chemo

He rocks
And watches
While his beautiful white hair
Dead at the root
Blows off his head
Strand by strand
Sprinkling new flowers like snow

Up in the sky
Aunt Ginny does another loop de loop

 

Sandy Crimmins has been published in a variety of print and electronic journals, including American Writing, City Primeval, femmesoul, Isosceles, and Hysteria. Her work appears in the anthologies Meridian Bound, The Eternal Now, and Pagan’s Muse. She is also a spoken word artist, performing her work with musicians, dancers, and fire-eaters.