Portrait & Shadow

by Andres Cerpa

The curtains sail into the room with the memory of presence behind them

while my father waits in the dark taking apart what is left of his former selves,
        like a pianist, drunk at the keys, playing the same four notes,

letting them ring in the pedals until they haul themselves back into sleep.

He says, I am shadow

& the thief at the seam of his spine slides through the blades of his shoulders,
        hollows the blood, while the dopamine cheapens

like a dollar-store lighter & suddenly, another streak in his Depends emerges as proof.

This too in Arcadia--

the meadow in twilight's last streak of red before he enters the tree line,

which is already waiting, its small footpaths like paintings held in storage,
        their deep palettes so close they strangle to a labyrinth

laced on an MRI-black. The wolf there tears at his tendons,

leaves him always in a fog, & if he emerges it is only to watch but not to enter
        the burning city & self he still loves.

He says, I am the smoke's mascara

& I know he is imagining the Bronx he can never return to,
        where his youth is held in the thin frame of a bicycle

as it cuts through a billow of smoke. The city burned each night & each morning
        he rose to ride through the rubble. The what was,

the father I hold onto to care for his shadow never gets old--

he is kind & clear. He rises each morning & lifts me onto the back of his bicycle,
        he pedals while I glide above the city in wonder.

Jubilate Civitas

 

by Patrick Phillips

I will consider a slice of pizza. For rare among pleasures in Gotham, it is both      exquisite and blessedly cheap. For its warmth is embracing, its smell the      quintessence of hope. For it can be found in all boroughs, every few blocks,      yet never two slices the same. For its makers speak many tongues. For dusting the counter with cornmeal and flour,      without looking down, they pummel and roll out      the dough. For they heap out the still-steaming sauce and, with a      touch of the ladle, paint it in rings like a bull’s-eye,      or a tree-stump, or a thumb. For they smile at each other’s jokes, grasping great      handfuls of cheese. For wiping both hands on an apron, they nod at the      phrase “not too hot,” and start one of a hundred      little clocks in their heads. For their corded forearms reach deep in the oven with      a long-handled paddle, giving each pie, with a flick,      its requisite spin. For heat bubbles and blisters and browns the      miraculous crust. For even in the tiniest shop you can find every style:      sagging with mushrooms and bacon, broccoli and      pineapple, chicken, and sausage, and onion. For time passes slowly awaiting a slice, and reminds us      how sweet it is to be alive at this moment on earth. For it slides to a stop in a little city of shakers, where      with pepper and oregano, garlic and parmesan, we      citizens make it our own. For you can fold it in half like a taco and eat it while      standing or driving, or walking and working your      phone. For I have seen the bearded young men of Brooklyn      sit upright to eat it, riding bicycles through      redlights, at midnight, in the rain. For with each bite the paper plate grows more      translucent with grease, till it glows like stained      glass over the trash can. For it has nourished our children and soothed many      sorrows. For in a time of deceit it is honest and upright,      steadfast and good—beloved and modest and      known. For its commerce makes nobody rich and nobody      poor. For that, to us, it is home. From the book Song of the Closing Doors

For Henry's Bar

 

By Joseph Rios

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

I’m on an errand to find my grandpa. I’m ten
and finding freedom in a sanctioned outing
on my bike through the streets of Clovis, CA.
I roll past Silver’s house and peek into the backyard
of broke drunks holding paper bags around
a barrel fire. One who just came back
from taking a leak is seasoning some carne
they bought with the tallboys across the street
at Numero Uno market. The door chimes when
I walk in and see Artemio’s white mane. His mustache
stretches from his nostrils to his sideburns
and up into his waxed pomp of hair.
My grandma says I’m not supposed to talk to him,
but he always asks how she’s doing.

I don’t see my grandpa anyplace. Art says
he’s around somewhere. I go to Ruby’s
next door. I’m not allowed, but I look in.
I’m hit with a gust of cigarettes and Bud Light.
Half a dozen heads turn my direction. No dice.
I ride down Pollasky with feet out each way.
I swerve left and right, free, for once. I am this
far from the shouting distance of my grandma.
I take to the alley just for kicks and pop a wheelie
behind the appliance shop. I pull up behind Henry’s,
knowing grandpa’s in there. A few other grandpas too.

I don’t knock. I stay on my bike. I realize
I’m not ready to go home and like most men
in this town, grandpa doesn’t want to be found.
I keep riding. I go North toward what’s left
of the railroad tracks. There’s a grey cloud
moving across the sky and I imagine I’m
chasing it, I’m right behind it. I keep riding
until it’s all oleanders and stacked railroad ties.
I never thought I could go this far. I get off
the seat and stand. I glide next to a forgotten
caboose. I imagine I’m the howling train now.
My tires kick dust as they crunch over the dry dry dirt.

Easter Sunday Poem

 

by Tammy Melody Gomez

According to my plan, I did indeed bike to Mama’s home on Easter Sunday / yesterday. We chatted from a distance, she at her front door, me on St. Augustine lawn. Our Easter Sunday family gathering in the year of COVID, without a table or a meal. From my daypack, I brought out an empty shell with cut paper filling: a hand-painted cascarón—confetti egg— and gently placed it one lone one on her porch and stepped away, I won’t mind if you leave it there or maybe just smash it with your shoe. Our hearts have been broken before when prison, money, or unsettled rifts have kept us from our holiday home. Today, by phone, Mama tells me that she forgot about it overnight but now the one lone cascarón is inside her house. “She’s cute,” Mama said. “It’s a she to me.” From the collection Together In A Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic, edited by Alice Quinn (Which just so happens to have a bicycle on the cover.)

Purple-Handed

 WHICH THE PHRASE red-handed, meaning caught in the act, meaning smeared with guilt, out out damned spot, is a bastardization of, given as purple-handed is the result, this time of year, of harvesting mulberries, which Aesop's ant might do with freezer bags or Tupperware, but, being sometimes a grasshopper, I do with my mouth, for that is one of the ways I adore the world, camped out like this beneath my favorite mulberry on cemetery road, aka Elm Street, aka, as of today, Mulberry Street, the wheel of my bike still spinning, as the pendulous black berries almost drop into my hands, smearing them purple and sweet, guilty as charged.

by Ross Gay

From The Book of Delights

This book of "essayettes" - sometimes prose-poems - was chosen as the 2021 Everybody Reads selection by the Multnomah County Library, and will be made available for free to all patrons beginning in early February, 2021.

Street Birds

 By Tyree Daye

We hunt here, I was shown death

at the age of seven, something dead

in my uncle’s hands.

I touched the belly of the black snake

felt its body a muscle tense.

I know nothing

of the baby birds cut

from the sour smell of its stomach,

just as I know nothing

of the sister and brother I watched cut

from the back seat of a flipped over car,

their own little cave.

My uncle tossed the thin-winged birds

into the air; lost

in the overgrown wood forever.

They never flew, never rode

their Huffy bikes from street end

      to street end.

Never raced each other,

never turned a bike into a motorcycle

with an empty orange soda can. The black snake tail

will swirl until the sun goes down,

until the devil comes to get it.

I began to pray

for a new skin for my mother.

Once I cold name 

all the new things.

Mutt puppies, new heads of lettuce,

my uncle’s new car, new red heart.

From River Hymns

Prayer

by Laura Kasichke

The windshield’s dirty, the squirter stuff’s all gone, so

we drive on together into a sun-gray pane of grime
and dust. My son

puts the passenger seat back as far as it will go, closes
his eyes. I crack my window open for a bit
of fresher air. It’s so

incredibly fresh out there.

Rain, over.
Puddles left
in ditches. Black mirrors with our passing 

reflected in them, I suppose, but I’d
have to pull over and kneel down at the side
of the road to know.

The day ahead—

for this, the radio
doesn’t need to be played.
The house we used to live in

still exists
in a snapshot, in which
it yellows in another family’s scrapbook.

And a man on a bicycle
rides beside us
for a long time, very swiftly, until finally

he can’t keep up—

but before he slips
behind us, he salutes us
with his left hand—

a reminder:

that every single second—
that every prisoner on death row—
that every name on every tombstone—

that everywhere we go—
that every day, like this one, will
be like every other, having never been, never

ending. So
thank you. And, oh—
I almost forgot to say it: amen.

Again, a poem from the Poem-a-Day posts by the Academy of American Poets. The author says:

“This prayer of thanksgiving was inspired by exactly the things I put in the poem: the ordinary drive with my son beside me in the passenger seat; the man who rode his bike beside us and saluted us; the weather and the sense of stability and gratitude for stability I had at that moment; the sense that things were going to last and be preserved, if only in memories and snapshots, glimpses of recognition passed between strangers, or between human beings and what felt, at that moment to me, like a benevolent creator who deserved some acknowledgment, even if we are really, all of us, on death row, even if the immortality I felt I got a glimpse of might have been the kind of immortality one achieves having had her name chiseled onto a tombstone. But, I had a lovely glimpse of eternity there, for a minute.”