Poetry – Page 7 – THE CITY KEY

“Under the City, 1992” by Gene Fendt

On the subway you see:
sorrowful, defeated, dazed,
a girl almost in tears,
dark hair hanging
over her face; the man
in a dirty Giants jacket
asleep at 5:15;
and in the next odd car
an ethereal beauty, turned
to see herself in the dark
glass, not yet aware
of the world, nor wanting it.

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Gene Fendt is the Albertus Magnus professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Kearney. His first book of poetry, “Eternal Life and Other Poems” will be published early in 2025 by Angelico Press.

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.

“Welcome to Bella’s” by Michael Theroux

Outside, the crisp yellow heat is brittle and breathtaking,
and has just flattened the afternoon.
Inside, there is cool dark red wine,
piles of pasta, platters of cheese & crusty garlic bread
with little plates of olive oil and balsamic,
and fresh ripe fruit – and time.

Time enough for us to talk, leaning in close
Bella’s – as if the very canals of Venice ran by outside.
Not streets of the southern San Joaquin.
Dull car traffic seems to be replaced
by gayly painted gondola poling their quiet way along –
while we sit with elbows on a red checkered tablecloth.

Apropos for Italy to exist here in America,
to not blend in, but to stand out bright,
discrete and insular, its own three-block nation.
Whether Napoli or Cherokee, we are a Nation of Nations
exuding the heady aroma of Difference,
the essence of Diversity.

TERU-2023

Michael Theroux’s career has spanned from field botanist, environmental health specialist, green energy developer and resource recovery website editor. Now he is shifting from the scientific and technical environmental field to the creative. He spends his days writing incessantly in his home in Northern California.

“The Problem of Sequencing” by Jim Stewart

Motivation: Brooklyn is a matrix of blocks
for example, on Church the cars roll slowly, and honk
to pick up rides off the street. Everyone knows a way
to get around, squeeze between. In a Hilbert space
the dimensions can be infinite. So where are you?
From Empire Ave to Eastern Parkway the hill rises
and the Messiah’s face is everywhere. The problem
is trivially solved in spacetime. But every corner
is different from the day before. In the old truck lot
piledrivers are pounding in another tower beam.
The pierogi place is a weed store. Everyone knows
a way to a place they saw five years ago, or twenty.
It’s still there, and all gone. I’ve seen people stay
right where they are and end up in a different city.

Jim Stewart

Jim Stewart has been published or has poems forthcoming in In Company, New Mexico Poets after 1970, Liminality, Rattapallax, Passengers Journal, and the Moonstone Arts Center’s Ekphrastic Poetry anthology. He co-edited and designed Saint Elizabeth Street magazine and hinenimagazine.com. He teaches programming and logic in New York.

“Dave’s” by John Grey

Old soldiers line up at Dave’s downtown,
buy newspapers, scratch tickets,
and play their Keno numbers.

Theirs are the silent footsteps
not drawn by the smell of bus-diesel,
but to spend another morning
with head-shaking headlines
and luck as forbidding as enemy planes.

While others rush to the job,
they take their time
just in case it’s not the surly Dave’s cashier
who’s there to take their money
but that losing lottery number…death.

It’s a warm day already.
There’s no wind.
The air is thick as the soup
their wives serve up
night after night.

Dave’s is air-conditioned at least.
And there’s a table at the back
where they can curse politicians,
their fortune, their knee-joints
and the threadbare thanks
they got for having served.

No point bringing up the good in their lives.
Morning is not the time.
Dave’s could never be the place.

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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.

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.

“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.