Writing – Page 2 – THE CITY KEY

“The Eagle and Mrs. B.” by Linda Romanowski

Many a Philadelphia area college student spent those post-Thanksgiving/Pre-Christmas days working at one of the “Big Three” department stores in Center City: Strawbridge & Clothier, Lit Brothers, or John Wanamaker’s. Due to my mother’s influence, I thought working at Wanamaker’s was the best of all worlds. After all, who could resist the classy interior and exterior window displays, the jagged mountain range stroke of the owner’s signature on the side of the building, and the transportation proximity?

Two other striking figures claimed the store’s signature distinction: the Wanamaker eagle and the annual Christmas fountain and light show. The serene and imposing gilded bronze aviary statue was the focal point for gathering, for claiming “lost parents,” and for bon voyages until next time.

Lifting one’s eyes to the sights, sounds, and waving fountain streams of the hourly Christmas performance stopped shoppers in their tracks and delighted the minds of wide-eyed youngsters who rarely cried during those few minutes of awe. My first recollection of seeing the aqua wonder made me fearful, thinking at any moment, the fountains would fall from their upper stage perch and drown the audience below, extinguishing the prancing lights in the process.

Not every pair of eyes welcomed this holiday diversion. My first Christmas working season in the children’s department in 1972 provided a novel view of the saleswomen employed at the makeup counters. The daily music grinding of “Frosty the Snowman” did nothing for their business. No cash registers rung in harmony with “O, Christmas Tree.” Gazers leaned on their pristine cosmetic display cases; their backs turned away from the porcelain faces of Estee Lauderettes, who resorted to makeup remover to erase the handprints and elbow marks on their precious encasements of promised beauty and glamour. No allure of scented bottled blossoms could overpower the lofty sounds and scenery above the audience. It must have been the bane of their existence, their dreams of pocket money ruined by lit-up distraction. One year, I counted viewing thirty-six performances of Rudolph’s very shiny unpowdered nose glowing across the ceiling.

*****

Every college student on Wanamaker’s holiday payroll hoped to work for the main floor supervisor, Mrs. B., known for her kindness. She was a smartly dressed, middle-aged Jewish lady, brownish-black hair coiffed to perfection, with no-nonsense eyeglasses attached to a pearl chain that hung elegantly around her neck. Her high-heeled pumps that coordinated with every outfit gave her an acceptable height, appearing taller than she was. Her trim figure clicked in tandem with her stride. Mrs. B. took the time to acquaint herself with several of us. One afternoon, during the height of the Christmas rush, she announced that she would retain us for the week after Christmas. We were delighted, as it meant money for next semester’s textbooks would be less of an issue. All we needed to do was follow her instructions without variation.

When we punched in on the time clock on December 26th, Mrs. B. led us to an unfamiliar store area, one at a time. We were placed separately in obscure areas of dressing rooms and stock areas, out of the view of the “suits” who might sniff through the aisles looking for post-holiday imperfections. There were close calls, but none of us were spotted. Had we been “caught,” we would say we were Christmas shopping to maintain our ruse. During that week, Mrs. B. was ubiquitous, her eagle eyes surpassing that stony sculpture’s glance on the first floor. We functioned seamlessly as the suits paraded the aisles, praising Mrs. B. for her diligence and attention to detail. I’ll always wonder if the Wanamaker eagle suspected her and kept the secret, among all the others, under its ornate-clad feathers.

Linda M. Romanowski is a graduate of Rosemont College, in 1975 with a BA in Psychology and Elementary Education, and this past May as an MFA graduate in Creative Non-fiction. She was assistant editor of Non-fiction for Rathalla magazine, Rosemont’s literary publication. Her Italian heritage-based thesis, “Final Touchstones”, earned with distinction, is scheduled for publication by Sunbury Press within the coming months. Several of the essays from her pending book were published on City Key, Ovunque Siamo and the Mario Lanza Institute Facebook page. She recently reviewed Ellen Stone’s poetry book “What is in the Blood” for the online Philadelphia Stories 2021 Fall issue. Her poem, “Seen In Translation” was selected for inclusion in the Moonstone Arts Center Protest 2021-100 Thousand Poets for Change.

Three Poems by Ed Meek

Soundtrack of the City

The soundtrack of the city
can keep you up nights
or hum in the background
a discordant tune of wheels turning
and gears interlocking, trucks
unloading, planes taking off
and coming down.
The bass thumping in a passing
smoke-filled car. A Harley roaring
down the street. Sirens wailing
of rescues and D.O.A.
daytimes the volume
jumps to life with the birds
who serenade leaf blowers, lawn mowers,
horns, the ebb and flow
of traffic, the heavy breathing buses
the scraping skateboards,
barking dogs. The disembodied voices
of neighbors you’ll never know.

The Reserved Section

I’d wandered into the reserved section by mistake
but the performance had begun
and it was too late to escape
to the seats for the general public
my inexpensive ticket already paid for.
It was as if I had pulled back the curtain
and entered the first-class cabin–
been admitted to the club
and seated at the head table.
The champagne was vintage.
The caviar Russian.
The lights dimmed.
I was just behind
a Guggenheim and a Rockefeller.
They didn’t seem to see me.
I was invisible as I often am.
For once it was an advantage.
I glanced down the row at two
black women who smiled and nodded.

Hostages to Heat

In Brooklyn when the temp hits 90
the heat invades our claustrophobic co-op.
Outside, the cement sends the heat
up through our bodies in waves.
We float in our sweat like seals in the shallows.
I used to love the feel of sweat
blanketing my body
running in the mid-day sun
and playing pick-up basketball on black tar.
Now we dread summer days when
an orange disk occupies a hazy sky,
Particles of ash coat our lungs
and the sunlight sears our eyes.

Ed Meek is the author of four books of poetry and a collection of short stories. He has had work in The Sun, The Paris Review, Plume, The North American Review, The Boston Globe. He writes book reviews for The Arts Fuse. He is a contributing editor for The Rivanna Review. He teaches creative writing at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. He lives in Great Barrington with his wife Elizabeth and their labradoodle Mookie. His most recent book is High Tide.

“How to Survive Rain in Los Angeles” by Miro Myung

New moon in Aries, and the rain is pounding down on Los Ángeles. Patio furniture is tested throughout every neighborhood as parrots take shelter in the branches guarding us from high above. Love is a theme of this erotic moon phase–as well as the honking of car horns as the 110 South dangerously fills with standing water. Disjointed, disoriented, chaotic flow of the city that captures so many of our imaginations slowly molds you into its form: flexible jelly with a core of steel.

This is one of those days where it seems safer to just stay in bed. It sounds bad out there I think to myself as the beeswax candle cultivates a world of shadows on my bedroom walls. It’s 6:42am and the forecast is already set–scroll down and down, fall in and out of love with the bathroom mirror, cook dinner with your ex, play tug-of-war with your dog–do anything but open that front door.

But if you do have to leave, make sure to have water in your car in case you get sucked into a sinkhole on Sunset Boulevard and eat a healthy breakfast, but–no eight-hour fasting-whole-thirty kind of thing. Eat something hearty that gives your day a “leg up” or a “leg sideways” so that you can circumnavigate the loneliness of rain in Los Ángeles. The only certainty of today is that we will all have patio furniture that is going to be sixty-percent rot by summer and that our collective anxiety about the rain pounding that engineered Ikea wood will also hold us back from saving our four-legged friends from their fate. When it rains in Los Ángeles we live in denial–like when it’s 108 degrees Fahrenheit–we put a podcast on, throw some boy-brow gel on or whatever makeup makes you feel more ghastly and beautiful, and traverse through the city like it’s made for living.

To live in Los Ángeles is to be in love with the non-ending. Other cities might promise you solid conclusions–you know the neighborhoods well enough to predict the calm dinner out with the same friends, you know that people will complain about traffic and the influx of tech workers, you know that there will be no crowd spilling out of the neighborhood bar on a Tuesday night, you know that if you are lucky enough you will end well here in a way that will satisfy the order of things–a house, a career, a marriage, and even a golden retriever.

To live in Los Angeles is to be in love with the non-ending; a neighborhood bar is hard to locate because the highways keep beckoning you further and further into the tangled web of homes and palm trees and tiny restaurants bursting at their seams and linen-wearing humans picking herbs in Griffith and hidden farms in South Central twirling disco balls over colorful chickens and bowling alleys that sit along train tracks serving sukiyaki and cheese fries. This is a city of lonely transplants mixed impossibly with families who have lived here for generations and they clash in their cultures, but together, fall in love with the clean air after a steady rainfall.

On the highway is where I find my largest community–I used to think of myself as entering the herd, but now I see it as a convergence of “we’re all in this together” mentality and a “we are also very fucked” thought process. I love it. Does that make me abnormal? I’m not sure if Los Ángeles has a barometer for “normal” like smaller, more organized towns do. To be wacky, loud, disruptive, joyous, angry, and incredibly scared is to blend in here. If you’re not a little worried from time to time you’re not driving through the city enough.

Yet within the chaos are microcosms of sensual peace–Ethiopian jazz filtering through old speakers as lemon trees drip water onto terracotta tiles, smoke from chicken being barbecued in a grocery-store parking lot that captures your imagination, sunbeams melting over two-story level buildings in Koreatown, waves in Malibu tilting towards land boasting their dolphins, the clinking of glasses in old Hollywood steakhouses where the red velvet looks better in the dim light, spiraling labyrinths in Topanga Canyon where hikers hug the famous tree, mornings in your bedroom as you listen to the music of horns and rain and parrots and your neighbor chuckling to herself.

Miró Myung published articles in Tom Tom Magazine, a poem in Luna Collective Magazine, LA County Library’s “Love Letters in Light,” and co-published poetry book “Almanac of Tiny Clouds.” She does visuals for indie band Tangerine featured in NME, The Guardian, Rolling Stone India, Billboard with a BFA from UCLA.

“Temp Job” by James B. Nicola

Walk down Fifth Avenue for lunch hour when
you have a temp job in the Forties or
the Fifties; next day, do the walk again
and I’ll bet you a hundred to one you’re
not going to see any of the same
faces. I did this for about a year
when suddenly I thought I heard my name,
or something similar (I’m still not sure).

I turned and shook a total stranger’s hand.
He squeezed, I think, my upper elbow too
as if some mutual past permitted such
a thing. The passing gesture, so unplanned,
impressed me. I could not say where he knew
me from, but I shall not forget that touch.

James B. Nicola, a returning contributor, is the author of eight collections of poetry, the latest three being Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense, Turns & Twists, and Natural Tendencies. His nonfiction book Playing the Audience: The Practical Actor’s Guide to Live Performance won a Choice magazine award.

“To Khulood al-Zaidi, Women’s Rights Activist” by Suzanne Morris

“Just to have the freedom to go wherever I wanted,
and to not think something bad might happen to me.”

I try to step outside
freedom’s airy shelter

and look in through
the open windows of my day:

how I stroll from house
to road, unafraid,

and, heart unflinching,
open the box to withdraw
the mail, then

wave at a friendly honk
from a passing car.

Nothing worthy of note
along the way.

Or so it seems,
until I think of her:

how, alone that time in Amman
she heeded a warning

and boarded a plane
for San Francisco

then rode the bus for hours
just because she could,

rode and rode
all over San Francisco,
just because she could

maybe her thoughts
drifting to Fern, who

might be there too,
had she survived

the short ride from Baghdad.

Imagine how,
by habit of mind,
she might have

lowered her eyes
from a stranger’s gaze

then, stepping out,
surveyed
the sloping street

for any suspicious sign;

how she might have
smiled to herself then, that

being free and being safe would
take some getting used to

at least for as long
as she was here

how she might already
have known that

Duty would call her home.

I think of her as I sit down
on my porch of an evening,
to read a book

how heedlessly I surrender
to a world of make-believe,

how easy it is to take
this small freedom
for granted.

The breeze picks up
and I look around,

suddenly alert.

I bring my fingers
to my cheeks,

trying to imagine myself
inside her skin:

the breeze upon her face
as she waits for the bus

in San Francisco.

Suzanne Morris is a novelist with eight published works, and a poet. Her poems have appeared in several recent anthologies, and in online poetry journals including The New Verse News, The Texas Poetry Assignment, Stone Poetry Quarterly and The Courtship of Winds. She resides in Cherokee County, Texas.

“Sailing to Sanctuary” by LindaAnn LoSchiavo

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“Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Emma Lazarus, 1883

What made them leave their native lands by boat?

Some heard fierce military thunder, saw
A blood moon rise in new duplicitous
Skies gone gunmetal gray, ruth camouflaged.

Some farmers ached from death’s cruel carpet ride,
Drought, famine, floods, the disintegration
Of dreams, all gone, one at a time.

Some faced more personal oppression: skin
Tone, birthright’s claims denied, religious foes,
Recognizing that falsehoods were designed
To dominate. Truth’s weapons were inert.

Some knew their powerlessness to outgrow
A humble past or lifelong poverty.

Approaching Ellis Island, side by side,
Examining our Lady Liberty,
Dropping an arm’s warm anchor happily
Around each other’s neck, they sense change
Is close along with assimilation — —
The circularity of homeland’s quest.

LindaAnn LoSchiavo: Native New Yorker. Elgin Award winner. Nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Ippy, Firecracker, etc. Member: BFS, HWA, SFPA, Dramatists Guild. Recent titles: “Vampire Ventures,” “Apprenticed to the Night,” “Always Haunted: Hallowe’en Poems.”

https://VampireVenturesPoems.com
LindaAnn Literary: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHm1NZIlTZybLTFA44wwdfg

“Cairo at Dusk” by Fred Tudiver

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The loudspeaker calling to sunset Maghrib prayer
carries through the sluice
of cardamom Cairo air
into the waterless, sandy dusk
filled with cars that speak their resolve.

I pray our ’82 Lada Zhiguli taxi
will make it to the hotel in Gezira,
memories of the last taxi ride break down
in Tahrir Square still fresh.

I can taste that pizza chased with iced karkadé tea
in Maison Thomas Pizza, under the flyover near the Marriott,
where the restaurant servers could not stop
touching Burt’s 3-year-old daughter’s blonde hair,
a shade they had never seen before.

After, we walk over to the hotel
and sip cold limones in the verdant garden bar
at the back.
Filled with stories.

Here’s the thing:
This poem is filled with vaporous nostalgia for
a Peace Corps style of working and living,
long forgotten by most.
Yet, perhaps this was my favorite life.

Fred Tudiver holds a BSc from McGill University, and an MD from Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is a new poet and likes to explore the human condition and the natural world. He has published in Black Moon magazine, Tennessee Voices Anthology, and the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

“Big Talk” by Mari de Armas

Whenever prompted, I provided my new address, followed by a forceful pronunciation of ATT-LANT-TAH. I said it this way to the movers, the insurance agent, and the post office until I heard my friend Lisa, an Atlantan herself, say, “Ahlannuh,” in one-and-a-half syllables.

We were catching up over drinks at a sandwich shop called Victory. Being new to the area, I asked her to pick the place and was a bit taken aback when she suggested it. I envisioned a Subway restaurant with a liquor license, but I was pleasantly proved wrong. It was a lively establishment with a smattering of booths and tables anchored by a busy bar. Two women with murals of ink tattooed on their arms bounced from table to table, taking orders and delivering mason jars of colorful drinks. Our beverages had just been delivered, mine a Victory Libre cleverly served in a glass Coke bottle, and hers a whiskey-coke slushy that made me wish I had a tolerance for Jack Daniels. Lisa, a writer, an amateur sailor, and a roller derby girl, could easily drink me under the table, so I was fairly certain that a few sips of her slushy weren’t enough to cause her to slur.

“Say it again,” I demanded.

“What? Ahlannuh?”

I had gone through this song and dance in Los Angeles already, running around town mispronouncing everything from street names to neighborhoods. I wasn’t about to make that mistake again, so I asked Lisa to listen and correct my pronunciation as I rattled off every landmark I could possibly remember from my guidebooks. She stopped me at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.

“Everything is pronounced the same,” she said, waving her hand. “There are only three or four names that might be confusing.”

For those, she provided solutions apt to my maturity level. She explained that the first syllable in Piedmont Park is pee because you may need to do that in the bushes. The city of Decatur is pronounced ‘dick hater’ due to the prevalence of lesbians. Krog Market is not pronounced like Kroger Supermarket, but instead, it rhymes with hog because you go there to pig out. She said to resist the urge to pronounce anything in Spanish. Ponce ends in a silent ‘e’ like the word pounce. When Atlantans want you to pronounce the ‘e’, they add a ‘y’ to the spelling as evidenced in the name of a neighborhood called, Poncey-Highland.

I thanked her wholeheartedly for the lesson.

Two Poems by Richard Collins

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UNCLE HARLAN

I always loved when Uncle Harlan came to visit
Not often but when he did I didn’t miss it

He was what I didn’t know existed
Something our women called sophisticated

Back again from Europe he treated us
To a slideshow: Madrid, London, Paris

He wasn’t an uncle really of course
But some distant cousin, third or fourth

Handsome Uncle Harlan had style and taste
All the women whispered it was such a waste

That he was a (quote/unquote) Confirmed Bachelor
Which meant in those days he either played the women

Or played the woman to other men. I didn’t care
He was tall and angular, long neck and slick black hair

Peppered his speech with French and Spanish phrases
Failed to teach me not tongues but how to tie my shoes

I tie them still with clumsy loops like cowboy lassoes
That elicit laughter, so I switched to loafers like his

Soft Italian leather like skin to touch
Buffed to perfection, that is: not too much

He didn’t want to be tied down. Convention kills
He confided. His European souvenirs were personal

Secrets to be savored, not shared as public art
But hidden in the hollow camera of the heart

To this kid, it was no one’s business what he did
He’d been to Paris, London and Madrid.

SACRED CITIES AND PROFANE

Tlachihualtepetl

From the Garden of Edinburgh
Back to the city of brotherly love

A taxi stuck in snow in Swansea
Never reaches London, much less Copenhagen

A train breaks down at Saint Pancras Station
Canceled pilgrimage to Canterbury

A blushing romance in Bath
A surrender, a seduction, a velvet rejection

Legs remembered and streets forgotten
Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels, the Hague.

***

A plane lands clumsy as an Albatross
On a hijacked Grecian runway

For a honeymoon in Cretan caves
Pink and black Santorini sand

Worship in the bay of Kythera
Deep bows to terraced Sifnos vines

Tours and detours of Istanbul
Drowned nudes in underground cisterns

Selçuk’s Cavern of the Seven Sleepers
The sickness not quite unto Ephesus

Then back to mathematical Samos
And the legends of long-legged Lesbos

That was one life; this is another
In no particular order.

***

Driven to city after profane city
Touching down in Sofia, Timișoara

Far from naked rocks in the sea
Corinth and Thessaloniki

To Budapest and Bucharest
Cities asleep without rest

This is one life; that was another
Mixed like a cocktail with bitters and ice.

***

What about the car wreck on River Road
What about the pool cue sold

And what about the train wreck on the way from Trieste
To Belgrade, the engineer spatchcocked on a flatcar

On the very day that protesters in Tiananmen Square
Faced down tanks, next morning headlines in Athens told us.

***

Fact is, I died long before that in the City of Angels’
Valley of Slow Death, ascended in a Delta jet

Looked out over the panorama of my youth
Dry sands of Cucamonga to muddy waters of Pacoima

From the islands of Balboa to the beaches of Laguna
A trip to Venice for the price of a pawned guitar

Stolen kisses, kitsch and country music cliches
Marriages and mockeries and blood-soaked clouds

Tumbled down at last dead drunk and lost
In the haze of Ciudad de México, then Puebla

Long before the more fortunate infidelities of the fall
Resurrection an empty promise, or threat.

Richard Collins has lived in Eugene and Baton Rouge, Bucharest and Timisoara, Los Angeles and London, Swansea and now in Sewanee, Tennessee. His recent work has appeared in The Plenitudes, Willows Wept, and Marrow. A memoir, In Search of the Hermaphrodite, is out from Tough Poets Press (2024).

Two Poems by Ryan Harper

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Flight Path, St. Louis

Stressed skin—we were in descent—
there is only guessing westward
until the islands, the confluence,
the slant waters begin to tell true.

We have known Missouri by the props
and seams: levees, bottoms,
struts and stays of the highways
in crossing, headstones of Calvary
and Bellefontaine growing

on approach. We are knowing ourselves
as the great arch sways, close
quarters and wind-swung, teasing
expansive glances through small
frames—catenary upended, still
and ever bearing fantastic weight

in the base sectors. We course down
into Missouri, heavy in the current
that holds, resists our passage—
a landing just downstream from the last
great union until Cairo, Defiance,
all things between us arch
and flatter, a hyperbolic function.

Hudson Yards

Clear and Roman
the tug mid-river,
anchored with its cargo,
awaiting this day
its orders, its holdings low.

And the day arrives
in mute pangs of fire,
exacting dawn distending
between the ribs of the city
against the far shore—

the glass, the gathering flow,
the sun-drowsy vessels
clear for passage, holding
bleached economies
in freighted light.

Ryan Harper is an Assistant Professor of the Practice at Fairfield University-Bellarmine in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He is the author of My Beloved Had a Vineyard (Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2018). Ryan is the creative arts editor of American Religion Journal and lives in Bridgeport, Connecticut.