Press Send Poetry

Benson’s Market (Then and Now)

This morning, decided to explore some Baltimore-themed pieces…. Started with Charles (who I haven’t seen at President/Lombard in a looong time) and working my way down to Benson’s Market on Eastern….The city is constantly on my mind.

Benson’s Market (Then)

Sun glare off the wet pavement, I squint
and can see the wrinkled man,
worn white shoes, making his way
out the door of Benson’s Market on Eastern.
He has a brown bag and a cup of coffee
steaming, just like the Baltimore humidity.

He stands balancing his breakfast and
says words to a woman in a flowered housedress,
gray hair upswept high,
reminding me of a bird house that
used to sit empty in the very back of
our neighbor’s yard, except that one was green.

The light changes
and my tires greet the asphalt like
a quick handshake. The man is in my rearview,
walking up towards Patterson Park.
Another, much older, sits in an outdoor lounge chair,
thin legs crossed, watching him go.

Benson’s Market grows small;
diminishing in view the
blue and white checkered storefront and
a sign that says cordially,
bread eggs milk,
for your convenience, open 7 days.

Ahead of me the pigeons who sleep
soundly above the old Ukrainian Youth Center
have woken up
and flown.

Benson’s Market (Now)

Those must have been ghosts
I saw
When we last spoke.
Because the market blinds
Are torn
And cling to bits of dust and darkness
Like I sometimes do
To my tenuous memories.

No one has entered that door
With a ding
Of welcome in many years.

Who were those men that I saw, with
Their steaming cups of coffee
Their bread,
Their milk?
Who were those women
Talking of birds outside the blue-checkered front
That now
Seems so forlorn?

The streets aren’t quiet and peaceful.
The people sit
Empty waiting for the bus
By the Burger King.

Charles

Charles

A prophet
preaches in front of the scratched
hood of my car.
He is hidden beneath baseball cap,
and a suit of dark wool
too big for his slight bones.
His head is bowed beneath
the weight of a necklace
of trinkets only he understands.
The heat visibly surrounds
his dry and marbled outstretched hands,
but he does not sweat.

He speaks—
prophecies and ancient secrets
that are absolved
into the Baltimore humidity
without
any recompense. Without any
baptized soul
noticing.

Kendall

Seems I can’t stay away tonight! I was going back through some of my older pieces and found one that was near and dear. Written way back in a creative writing class in college….[Thank you Glaser]

Kendall

Sitting with you,
sand creeping up and over
salty legs and arms
fresh from a chilly swim,
and our skin prickling under
warm yellow rays of light

We decided to build.

And you shoveled and I dug
and we piled sand
grain after grain
into a dinosaur
with white seashell teeth
and a tuft of seaweed hair.

I looked up and
your blue eyes were laughing;
he certainly wasn’t scary
the way real monsters were.
The ones that stomp you down
and bite real hard,
teeth stained with blood.

He was funny and he was good.

So we were horrified
when a gang of little boys
rolling in like a summer storm
ran over him, all thunder and lightning
never once looking back
to see their destruction.

We screamed
and threw sand grenades
and tried to run after them
but our moms yelled, “sit down”
imagining themselves seashore queens
in sunken sand chair thrones.

And for the first time,
two little sand crabs
in the afternoon shining red
felt loss, simple yet deep,
before running off into ocean waves,
the dino swallowed by sea foam.

And now tonight without you
I walk this same beach lost,
clasping my hands for warmth,
feeling sand and those memories like a desert
cold without sun, buried in moonlight.

Then suddenly
a wave crashes over my toes and
my sandy hands take yours again
and I dream us walking hand in hand
salt wrapped in our hair,
our tan skin tingling.

(RIP little boo, Kendall Burrows, May 31, 1996)

Skyline Relief in a Passing Train

Skyline Relief in a Passing Train

I see the New York City skyline
Drenched in early morning orange,
Etched like a relief
In the side of a passing train,
Roaring beside my own.

The light washes over buildings and smoke stacks
And that in-between land of tall weeds from city
to reflection in train.

We just left and already it seems so far, already
My memory of a fat hazy moon
On 12th west side, is a dream.
Is this possible?
The full moon brings possibilities – he seemed
(In my dreamy stroll)
To smile down on me between those buildings
With a blessing.

E. B. White speaks of New York City so compellingly—
I’m willing, when I read it,
To run for the solitude and ferment
He describes
And now and now, opportunities
And possibilities,
Bursting at the seams, yet tempered with
The heavy
Weighty sadness of leaving
Home.

Which ancestors will aid in my decision?
Is this my will or
Is it my great aunt Alice who swore she was too afraid to try?
Or my great grandmother Alice who was (from her poems)
a wife and mother first?

Or my father, who stayed in Baltimore? Although in this instance,
I need only ask, “Daddy, what should I do?”

Crossing in click-clack, the trains pass each other by,
The crossroads clearly defined.

Rio

The more I sit here (trying to “work”), the more I day-dream back to those beautiful beaches in Ipanema…. A taste for you:

Rio

We left the airport to stay another night. Pedro made the tear and
it began.

It began under my tongue and bitter.
It began with foaming waves and coconut water,
all in moving melted samba.

For unknown hours we tasted the night unfold:

Wild with eyes wide, seeing the night as cats do,
we scratched the underbelly of the city, that dog—
the main streets littered with impudent debauchery, the back streets
littered with impudent poor. We graffiti artists,
my foreign eyes like a Pollack on the skyline.

For unknown hours we were the universe and
Rio was the star matter, the dust, the space, the
alpha and omega. Then, oh,

A breeze, a walk, a bed,

and sandy feet lying hot with Pedro.
My body buzzed; my eyes darting around the lights.
Outside the moon howled low and full around the Cristo.
Inside the breathing sounded like an animal alive,
so steady it stalked, up and down.

In minutes, we were bathed in the smallest
sliver of light forcing through the blinds.
We fed our grumbling bodies with ham and cheese and coffee.

Outside the streets burst busy with the day—
the buses snorted; the waves slithered.

winter sun

From my great-grandmother Alice B. Johnson (as published in “Where Children Live” (1958))… for a morning where I was woken by the icy resistance and give way scrape, boot crunching ritual of car cleaning before work…

Winter Sun

The winter sun is bright,
Though winds blow loud and shrill,
And plants grow tall and green
Upon the window sill.

It is as if their leaves,
Forgetting winter’s chill,
Lean toward the warmth of the sun,
Remembering summer still.

rows of no smoking lights

One more for now, while I have the time and energy…. This one was written two years ago, when I was so very afraid that I wouldn’t be home in time to say goodbye to my grandmother. [and I know some of these starting poems are a little bleak, but I promise there are happier ones on the way…]

Rows of No Smoking Lights

The captain has turned off the seatbelt sign
so it is only the rows of no smoking lights
that run above my head off into the distance.

I am sitting upright, tray table secured, waiting
for my tears to dry. Waiting for this plane to land.
My Mexican sunburn is making me
chilled and my Mexican hangover is making me
parched.

My sister sleeps one seat over against the window,
I look past her and into the darkness, just one light
on the wing to create the illusion that we are actually
moving. At this point, I think it’s
possible that we’re underwater, in a dark wet world.

The pressure in my ears creates a solid weight
in the darkness. Above, the lights run on. If I stare at
them for too long, they seem to blur into one long line.
It reminds me of a long hallway.

I too will walk it someday.

song of March (2003)

easing myself into this whole “sharing with the world” thing. Starting with the more comfortable pieces (are politics more comfortable?) and planning to move forward from there….one from just before the Iraq war (George W. not George senior). In the style of T.S. Eliot…

Song of March (2003)

It snowed for no reason tonight,
just seemed the thing to do.
And quiet crowds cowered in their houses
with bread and water and
plastic and duct tape awaiting the inevitable;
the athlete,
the farmer,
the prom king and queen,
cried innocent and shivered while the enemy sweated
and lurked in every dark alleyway,
sweating in turbans and yards of cloth,
plotting and deceiving.

He turned the hourglass and let sand sift through his hands.

The few great left another generation alone to contemplate:
Crowds cowered in their fallen houses across the sea.
Covered women who come and go
weary from watching Michelangelo.
They’re told he’s an infidel, that he’s the one
because of his painted ceiling in Rome.

Yet it makes no sense again.
We grow so old; we
chant what we do not understand;
we lose the audience with haphazard metaphors that
tick like bombs, but make no sound— no questions,
no time left to consider.

He turned the hourglass and let sand sift through his hands.

The thing to do, seems the only thing to do.
In March we go,
in step we go,
before the sky can open up
beneath the weight of escalating egos,
of bipeds with opposable thumbs bent on the thing to do,
hitchhiking back to the beginning of it all—
the middle east,
the middle earth,
the point of the big bang that still reverberates now.

January (outside my parent’s house)

The cold smells
Of wood logs burning into ghosts
Of themselves and floating
Quietly, silently up to the wide
Eye of the ancestral moon.
There are no clouds tonight, no breeze.
Just the smell of wet snowflakes stubbornly
Hugging the shreds of grass and
the fingernails of the trees.

Walking out the front door,
My scarf traps my face with hot breaths,
My gloves hold tight to my keys.
I’ll wave as I drive away. My car
fighting to heat and accelerate at the same time.