Poetry – Page 7 – THE CITY KEY

From “Atlas” by Glenn Bach

Williamsburg Bridge
in the morning Manhattan bound:
the trees of the East
River park a thicket
of brambles, a brown blur
of winter, the sun behind you
a crushed daisy, hushed ferry cuts
a sword blade along the surface
of the river, the J train above your
heads a halo that goes and goes.

Williamsburg Bridge
in the evening Brooklyn bound:
a tug nudges a river barge,
you stood front window / front car
on the J train Brooklyn bound,
the underground
unfolding before you, graffiti-
thick and glimpses of squatters
and no sun forever.

And in the morning the same
rooftops and factories of Brooklyn,
the same barge again cutting
through a Hopper-painted
backdrop of skyscrapers,
green ribbon edging the Lower
East Side clockwork,
an ancient landscape
still and wise as the Hudson
Highlands, falling and falling
into Manhattan, an island
surrounded by water.

Originally from Southern California, Glenn Bach now lives in the Doan Brook watershed of Cleveland, Ohio. His major project, Atlas, is a long poem about place and our (mis)understanding of the world. Excerpts have appeared in jubilat, Otoliths, Plumwood Mountain and others. He documents his work at glennbach.com and @AtlasCorpus.

From “Atlas” by Glenn Bach

The fall of New York,
leaving the canyons of artifice
and the calculus of blooms
as we walk in our sleep, fireflies
in cupped palms, bees and their
drowning, this week a whirlwind
of weather slipped in
through an open window as keys fit
the steeplechase of locks
and shoulders find their coats
of Broadway and 115th,
flipped collars and checked
scarves framing fleeting expressions
at play across wind-bitten cheeks,
dispersing the thin threads
of words captured and elongated,
made firm in hand-set type, folded
and slipped into jacket pockets.

We breathe the runoff and the dust
of scuffling shoes, effluvia of insects,
hair growing imperceptible as bark,
cherry blossoms like WWII flak
in the sky.

Bricks across knees,
new words invented for what we see
emerging from suspended animation,
the light years of this continent
as we sew the holes in our pockets,
fill them with stones from both oceans.

But here the umber canyons, throbs
of gold taxicabs and all the trains full
of strap-hanging figures
with bodega-bought flowers
wrapped in cones of plastic,
children glancing up
at the giants
towering above them.

“Touched By” by Morgan Boyer

A transit car pole can tell you
many tales of times their steel
rod bodies were touched

By a community college kid
with Kleenex-filled jacket pockets
as she braves through flu season

By a beer-breathed Penguin’s fan
on the phone with his wife
relaying the 3rd quarter like a war story

By a 2nd generation Hispanic woman holding her plastic
bags by the flimsy handles that stretch ever so thinner

By an elderly man
scratching off lottery tickets
like bite sized scraps of a dry dandruff-ridden scalp

By a cardiac-eyed
Medicaid card carrier whose
lifeblood was replaced by metal
when the company switched to
an automated answering service

By a thirty-two-year old Penn State
grad heading to shovel french fries
into buckets just like his soot-faced
great-grandfather shoveled coal

By the administrative
assistant of a dentist who works
solely to afford anime
merchandise and streaming subscriptions

Touched by a soul that was now lost, not found

Morgan Boyer is the author of The Serotonin Cradle (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and a graduate of Carlow University. Boyer has been featured in Kallisto Gaia Press, Thirty West Publishing House, Oyez Review, Pennsylvania English, and Voices from the Attic. Boyer is a neurodivergent bisexual woman who resides in Pittsburgh, PA.

Please note: Poetry is compressed to fit smart phone screens. If you are reading this poem on a phone screen, please turn your screen sideways to make sure that you are seeing correct line breaks for this poem.

“Lost Chicago” by Joshua Ginsberg

This will be the only key now
to the map that leads back
to that place I left –

All other directions take me
somewhere I don’t know,
down endlessly defeated rows
of broken, boarded windows
and too-quiet streets
beneath the lonesome
shriek of wind.

Empty towers lean shadows
over every intersection
of is and was,
like a just-finished necropolis
of glass and steel

waiting to find
new use.

Joshua Ginsberg is a writer, entrepreneur, and curiosity seeker who relocated from Chicago to Tampa Bay in 2016. He is the author of “Secret Tampa Bay: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure,” (Reedy Press, 2020), and his poetry, fiction, and non-fiction has appeared in various print and digital publications. He maintains a blog, Terra Incognita Americanus and has been a business proposal and resume writer for over 10 years. He currently resides in Tampa’s Town and Country neighborhood with his wife, Jen, and their Shih Tzu, Tinker Bell.

Two Poems by John Grey

On the Way to the Job

Another morning.
Traffic’s where I live.
It moves. It stops.
It stops some more.
Only traffic can freeze the scenery.
Only traffic can reduce the world
to the bumper stickers of the car in front,
the face of the driver
in the rear-view mirror.
Luckily, I’m going someplace
I do not wish to be.
This is my preferred speed.
It almost doesn’t get me there.

Morning in the Alley

Sunrise seizes on those
already with cheap gin on the tongue
like a slow, non-violent reflex action,
sets aside some shadow for the alley
but shines a thimbleful of light
on gray eyebrows, malted hair.
The world is busy elsewhere
but these men sit still
for whatever the sunshine brings,
everything patient about them
except their thirsts.
The day seeks out trembling lips.
shaking lingers.
a bottle passed around like gold,
a few cuss words
and an itching of the groin,
Dawn knows where to get a drink
at this time in the morning.

John Grey is an Australian poet and US resident. He was recently published in New Plains Review, Stillwater Review and Big Muddy Review with work upcoming in Louisiana Review, Columbia College Literary Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review.

“Notre Dame” by Patrick Vitullo

Was its best face seen from

the Quai de la Tournelle,

Pont de L’Archeveche,

or Square Jean XXIII?

Whether the proboscis of facade

or the gothic grey body worded

and etched from the bookseller’s stalls

on the Quai de Montebello,

every look was different.

An arch of neck brought one up

its twin towers and shunned down

the spouting gaff of gargoyles.

Its rose window bloomed before the Seine

while pigeons peripatetic gathered

en masse before a statue of Charlemagne.

A man bedecked in the

beauty of his language

asked for francs, a baguette,

and then, when none were offered,

simply said, bonjour.

Like the countenance of its people,

that lean church beveled

its spire to the sky.

As Emmanuel tolled

solemnly the moment when

Christ died, the Elysian arms of

Our Lady buttressed

the man’s tired hands.

And all Paris

foamed in the wake of a bateau-mouche.

Patrick Vitullo is a writer, poet, essayist, and world traveler who lives in Havertown, PA. He was awarded the 1979 John T. Fredericks Prize in Literary Criticism by the University of Notre Dame where he graduated with a B.A. in liberal arts. He also has a law degree from Villanova University and limits his law practice to representation of injured workers. Patrick has been published in The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Antigonish Review.

“Predications of the Municipal” by Colin James

Your wrecking ball smashed into
my theater’s old brick walls
past a surprised audience,
onward through the stage’s
painted canvass backdrop
releasing a cast of amateurs.
The Rimbaud posters
in the dimly lit dressing room
peeled at the edges.

Colin James has a couple of chapbooks of poetry published. Dreams Of The Really Annoying from Writing Knights Press and A Thoroughness Not Deprived of Absurdity from Piski’s Porch Press and a book of poems, Resisting Probability, from Sagging Meniscus Press.

“9/11” by Pete Mladinic

In Cather’s story, “Paul’s Case,”
after the coach rides, the baths,
the tortoise shell brushes, mirrors,
satin sheets, chandeliers,
plush carpets and ornate tables,
after the champagne and caviar feast,
Paul takes his baggage of flesh
draped in soft clothes
onto a final coach
into final woods, and down to the tracks,
and hurls himself into the path
of a locomotive,
choosing this form of death over poison,
pistol, or rope. It seems
he wants nothing to remain of Paul,
wants Paul himself obliterated,
wiped clean from earth’s map,
no corpse, no likeness for mourners
to view and close the lid on,
and lower into an earthen hole.
Now, a hundred years after Cather’s Paul,
a father named Paul bids his family
goodbye,
not knowing it’s his final goodbye.
A farewell in the dark: he leans
to kiss his wife’s cheek,
and then to the room of his sleeping son,
also Paul (an only child of an only child),
and leans and kisses his son’s brow
and, with light approaching from the east,
walks out his gate and leaves
his familiar street, not knowing
the finalities of these minutes
of September 2001, and to others
“on floor” when the plane crashes
through, and the sky falls
and turns into a celestial inferno.
Nothing left of September Paul
and those on his floor, nothing left
of the floor, or the shoes
he was wearing, or his teeth,
his wallet, nothing left there.
How could he have so much, one moment,
and then not even his teeth, his hair,
his family. How different his case
from that of Cather’s brooding protagonist.

Pete

Peter Mladinic’s poems have recently appeared in Neologism, the Mark, the Magnolia Review, Ariel Chart, Bluepepper, and other online journals. He lives, with six dogs, in Hobbs, New Mexico. 9/11 originally appeared in Academy of the Heart and Mind.

“Abandoned Tenements” by Peter Mladinic

I lose the insomnia contest.
Someone stays awake the longest
who looks like but is not yours
truly. In a drawing contest I draw despair
as walls of black windows, hollow space.
Crossing the street I step up my pace
in the contest to see who leaves wins.
I stay on the street abandoned,
not wondering where did they go,
only mesmerized by the dark hollows
that were windows people looked out.
The next contest, to see who’s proud.
Yet I’m fixated on the empty street,
abandoned tenements, summer heat.

Peter Mladinic’s poems have recently appeared in Neologism, the Mark, the Magnolia Review, Ariel Chart, Bluepepper, and other online journals. He lives, with six dogs, in Hobbs, New Mexico.

Two Poems by Danny P. Barbare

The City of Charleston, SC

I like the old city. It fills me full
   of ghost.
How the horses still clop on the
   cobblestone.
A clipper ship floats in the harbor
   as if it has cross and bones
when the only lantern seems to
   be
   the moon
as steps draw nearer, between the
the shadows and the Spanish moss.

The City at Christmas (Greenville, SC)

These buildings are a little
smaller
the sidewalks no longer run
nor the lights so many and
magical
but I know they are there
somewhere in the
moonlight’s little coat.

Danny P. Barbare resides in the upstate of the Carolinas. His poems have recently appeared in Blue Unicorn and Ethel. And his poetry has been nominated for Best of Net by Assisi Online Journal. He has been published locally, nationally, and abroad.