Stevie's Law

I’ve two poems in the current issue of Misfit Magazine. Here is the first and a link to the issue.

Latkes

I hand grate
the potatoes and onions
though my friends
have switched to food processors.
My grandma always said
that without a bit of blood
the latkes hadn’t much taste.

Aside for a special dish or two,
grandma was no cook—
having more interest in professional
wrestling and divining the daily numbers.
Given a deck of cards, she could separate
you from your money faster
than you could say matzoh meal.

Latkes are best when piping hot.
My grandmother an impresario—
playing the sizzle-snap of the pan.
We would gather round the stove
like wolves that had found a rabbit,
and scarf the latkes down—
burnt fingers be damned.

Hunger pangs gone,
we retired to the dinner table.
A mound of latkes, sour cream,
and apple sauce
shared the spotlight
with grandma’s other masterpiece—
brisket, queen of comfort food.

http://misfitmagazine.net/archive/No-40/index.html

My poem, Looking for America, was made into a choral by the composer Marty Rokeach and recently performed (the choral was renamed Remembering We’re Are Alive). Here is the poem and the link to the performance:

Looking for America

Let us be
best friends
one last time—

roll out the old
Ford
and take

that trip
we so often
dreamed of

when young.
Head to
the west coast

on those two lane
roads that once
were America.

Remember
when we were
America too?

Fill that old
Ford with
chips and beer—

the radio set
to the “Nothing
but Oldies” Station,

loud enough
to remind us
we are still alive.

Swap lies
with the locals
in pubs on Main Street

and sample
the biscuits and bacon
in dozens of mom

and pop diners
in what was once
the heartland—

a thousand dots
on a tattered
gas station map

long ago
bypassed
and nearly forgotten.

And when
the Ford
throws a rod

in Kansas
or Colorado,
as of course

it must,
we can unfold
the aluminum

lawn chairs
and sit on the berm
to wait for the sunset.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bgnaeTdRu2r-FU6EIctbDQx1Twk4VznZ/view?usp=gmail

My grandmother liked nothing
better than to walk in the rain.
On days when most were calculating
how best to stay dry while getting from A to B
she would don her old gray raincoat
and even older brown umbrella
and walk a few miles down Church Avenue
past a hundred store fronts
to nowhere in particular.

She never wore a watch
and I often wondered
how she knew to turn back
or if she always would.
It would not have been that hard,
it seemed to me,
to find a better place to live.
I watched for her,
as if the watching were a magnet
to draw her back home.

I only walked with her once.
At first, I blabbered and struggled
to keep up—my stride
half of hers.
But I soon settled, realizing
the sound of the rain
didn’t need the accompaniment of my voice.
That very wet March Day
she took me into one of the corner candy stores
that dotted our path
for a burger and vanilla malt.
Grandma had tea with milk and sugar.
The trip back was half as long
and twice as quiet—in the best way
I could imagine.

Published today by the Bluebird Word

This first appeared in Word Fountain and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A friend reminded me of its existence. It’s been that kind of year.

The Year We All Got Cancer

Winter stayed.
The April rain so cold
it left blisters of ice
on an earth
as scarred and pockmarked
as a landscape mired in war.

We waited through the freeze and thaw
for some sign from the recalcitrant earth–
anxiety growing with each passing day.
The sun was of little use, peeking indifferently
through the skeletal clouds,
as if late for an appointment
on another planet.

We had become
a shivering muddle–
a people resigned to winter,
when we woke one day
to wild things bursting.
Fields of dandelion
and mustard greens and,
in the most desolate spot of all,
a stand of wild asparagus.

My Poem, North Country, was just published in Issue 11 of Livina Press. Here is the poem

North Country

Inspired by the Bob Dylan song Girl from the North Country

fair
and winter white
with unblemished
snow to my hips
and a cold so fierce
it disfigures.

These are badlands.
The border between
here and somewhere
like home.
Houses hidden behind fences
barely visible above
the snow
and neighborless for miles.

I grew to be a man here—
where the wind hits
heavy on the borderline.
This place where summer comes to die.
And if in my mind, I cross the Great Divide
one last time, in a pickup truck
as down on its luck as I am,
the treacherous wind assures me
that a flame still burns.

But in the North Country,
even the marble
markers that dot
the graveyards
crumble in the wind.

My poem, Prized Possession, is up at Lothlorien Poetry Journal. Here is the poem:

Prized Possession

Yogi was short and fat
and prone to tears
when things
didn’t go his way.

At eleven
he was the first
of our gang
to get glasses.

We were friends
and not one of us
called him
four eyes.

Instead, we took
turns trying his spectacles
on— smudging the lenses
past visibility.

His parents were poor,
the glasses a stretch,
and they reminded him
constantly to be careful.

I was there when
Eddie passed him
the basketball
and Yogi turned

to catch it
with his face.
He broke his nose
and had two shiners,

but the glasses
hit the grass
and came
through intact.

I saw them today
in a display case outside his office
when I went
to pick up my new specs.

My poem, Haunt is up at Call Me [ ]—(University of Alabama Creative Writing) in the Call Me [When You’re Dead] Issue. Here is the poem:

Haunt

I thought that you
would live forever.
One procedure

after another,
like changing
the batteries in your clock.

Yet the wing chair
is empty now.
Who would dare sit in it?

You were never a talker,
content to play a part
with your presence—

and yet
it is your voice
that has gone missing

from the room
you lived in
all these years.

Is that what we sense
when we declare
an old house haunted?

The vestige of all
those voices
willing to be heard.

My poem, Riding the Rails, is in issue 20 of the Loch Raven Review. Here is the poem:

Riding the Rails

Uncle Frankie
was no longer young
when he started
riding the rails.

He was a boxer once—
his face peppered
by a thousand jabs,
nose broken

here and there,
and a cauliflower ear
he’d yank on
when he wanted to make a point.

Frankie quit boxing
to run with Abe “Kid Twist” Reles—
and Murder Inc.,
the scourge of Brownsville.

“Kid Twist” and Frankie
were two tough Jews,
my dad would say
with a humongous smile.

The Feds came
looking for Frankie
now and again.
“He’s riding the rails,”

we’d say in unbidden chorus.
Frankie would visit
every few months
and bring us stuff

to use for “show and tell.”
But we wanted stories.
Frankie was better
than radio—

with his foot chases
and near misses
with the railroad dicks.
We didn’t care

if he stretched
the truth.
We were old enough to know
so little is totally true.

My book, Seven Mountains, is featured on Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Here is a link to the site:

Here is the featured poem from the book:

BEST INTENTIONS

I planted that copper beech
50 years ago today
for my 30th birthday.
It was little more than a stick,

barely surviving
its first three years,
although I watered
and trimmed it

and would have fed it
with a spoon
if I’d known how.
It’s magnificent now—

about 60 feet tall,
but entwined in power lines
and too damn close
to the house.

Tree surgeons are out back,
with their chainsaws
and mini-crane.
It will take a day or two

to cut it down.
Makes me wonder
if I was right to plant
it in the first place.

How responsible
are we
for what we nurture?
Trees, pets, children,

things we bring
to the world
or shepherd on their way?
Fragile as faith.

My poem, Air Raid, is up at the Red Eft Review. Here is the poem:

Air Raid

In Brooklyn,
in 1953, the air raid
sirens would wail
their warning once
or twice a week.

We would
dive under our desks,
assuming the half-inch
oak would protect us
from anything,

although the teachers
never assured us.
My brother assured me
my eyes would boil
in their sockets,

my charred skin
would peel
from my bones,
and no one
would know me from the skeletons

in the Museum of Natural History.
My parents said
that was silly talk,
but my brother told me
the commies had a missile

trained on the Empire
State Building
with a blast radius of 13 miles
and we were within the blast zone.
“Fortunately, he said, the bomb will incinerate us

before the blast blows us apart.
You’re toast,” he added,
taking a huge bite of the rye bread
that he had slathered
with half a stick of butter.

I couldn’t get the eyeballs
out of my mind,
and the day mom left me to shop,
the sirens wailed,
and I hid in the closet

covered in coats.
For the next month
or so, mom would tell friends
and relatives she found
me wailing louder

than any siren
could, and I might
be an instrument of Civil Defense.
70 years later, sirens still
make me close my eyes tighter than tight.