Where We Live Selected Poems

POEM FOR SOUTH PARK

by Gardner Astalos (endless rows of houses) i love you and i want you to feel it. i’m watching almost-writers who are addicted to weakness stand in doorways smoking–their hands are about to touch. their cousins are waltzing down the sidewalk, bloody palms frozen from red and blue slushies bigger than their heads, blazing sun beating down on their bare arms, getting rougher with every summer. i'll wait again for slush to gather on the street and turn into saccharine brown sugar in the winter albedo (just like it always does). i’ll carry my eyes and ears and lungs and teeth in a red backpack everywhere i go. a halo of lights around the city will pull me in as i reach the event horizon at 35 miles per hour. i am best friends with the top left seat of the bus and i don’t want to get off quite yet.

STERLING AVENUE

by Mary Catalfamo I could tell you my great grandfather had a garden. That he grew grapes on Sterling Avenue, where houses are strung as tight as rosary beads.

I tell myself there is no reason to drive by a barn red house with grape vines I cannot see and memories I already have. But I take that right hand turn every time I can.

I tell myself I could go anywhere. Grow in different soil, where ice and snow have never left cracks in the blacktop. Where there are not as many churches as there are places to drink.

But that’s not the turn I take.

Because there was once a man who had a wife named Mary and 40 years at a tool factory.

Because my dad went to his house as a child and so did I. Because the streets are whole prayers you can say in one breath.

Because even when there are no longer grapes, there will always be vines.

WHERE WE LIVE

by Monica Finger I put my grief on ice and lived elsewhere.

Each visit to this inverted room is a pilgrimage, an act of mourning.

In a stall that never locks I cry for the loss of you like I did for Warrel Dane and like you did for David Bowie As to an icon erected in this hall of worship.

Grief lives here because I can’t live here anymore.

WHERE WE LIVE

by Marie Hasselback-Costa I want you to see the leaves as they crisp and fall, the frozen cataract cascading, the deep steel rust and hard ice slip, the good neighbors who feel like promises and the future.

I want to tell you about where we live: how we thrive and blossom, how we find a new way through the past each morning and sometimes, often, falter in our best intentions.

I want to do justice to those around and within me: handle the possible with as much care as can be wrought.

I want to tell you about the spaces between potential and uncertainty, the breath that is taken when act and intent speak to each other in brave whispers, the hope that is held aloft in times when belonging is a lost thought.

For now: welcome.

BEAUTIFUL DEAD

by Paul T. Hogan You see these landscapes wrong. Stripped back to bone and outline – there is joy here. Beige meadow tagged with tall hollow stalks not so much bent as snapped by dry, ice wind – to feel peace with this means first you must stand in slop up to shin, wiping hands on jeans stiff with it already. These bony, sparse views are living, not dead. Do you hear only silence, standing here?

Does this changed garden show nothing?

Drop down to a knee, let a few heartbeats pass.

Bring down your shoulder. So many things easy to say about dying, standing up there, surveying and parsing.

But down here, it gets in your nose, charges the back of your throat. When you stand, spit it out, it’s the living you’ll taste arising.

MAID OF THE MIST

by Celeste Lawson Life flows into her and out of her all at once Her breath is the great mist rising above thunder Linked end to end by a prism of jewel colors She sank into the rapid whirl of the cosmos Communion, baptism, burial, each a blur in the wonder of this rush She became one with the legends soaked in sacred elixir Echoes of God rumble in her ears Although you see her as a speck in time, she is eternity flowing Eternity foaming thick and white, Easing the pain of broken bodies crashed upon the rocks She sends their weeping souls upward and outward with care Rising through the never-ending roar of her song of songs

THE 33

by Patrick Long Where do we live? In our cars Scuttling between office and house Pausing to let a siren pass.

This limestone grew over eons As great fish coiled above And the earth rolled toward the sun.

Horses once trotted here Couples strolled arm in arm And children played on the grass.

Then Moses raised his staff And parted our city.

Now we, like Pharoah, charge the gap Chasing what we have lost.

I AM FROM

by Namita Acharya I am from O-Cel-O sponges, from Lemon Pledge and Lipton’s Green Label tea.

From quick anger, doormat women Hot and cold, like summer rain on hot asphalt.

I am from The Pines Tall, terpen-pungent, and constant I’m from afternoon tea and laughing with heads thrown back, from Manshankar and Vasanti.

I’m from hospitable and ever-anxious from family is everything and education is our purpose.

I’m from Shiva Lingam and Ramayan I’m from Saurashtra where the desert meets the Arabian Sea Ladoo, hot rotis From the barrister who rebuilt Somnath temple And the inventor who built another temple in a foreign land On the bookshelves in the wood paneled den Smelling of mothballs and old leather suitcases Faces that look like me glance back from faded black and white photos and ask “What will you add to our legacy?”

THIS HAPPENED — THEN THIS HAPPENED

by Justin Mattew Lowe i should tell you from this ancient stump grew the last tree of Temuuk cut and sent to the pulp mill to make a single sheet of white paper on which a treaty was written all that lived on earth before suddenly could fit within a copper pot of ink i should also tell you about the quill pulled from our children’s plumage how it wrote simply upon the page Forever.

WHERE WE LIVE

by Matthew L. O’Malley Folks endure and stay and gather. And laugh and sing and study and testify. Stories are sequences and they are improvised at the edge of the heart and they are unbroken. When Richard tells me the story of his East Side, it’s like chance made present and becomes the ground of our thought which is how we study together. From the city of memory he spoke to me of home. But how, he said, can we speak of freedom? Main Street is Buffalo’s dividing line. It is Du Bois’s infamous “color line”— the problem of the twentieth century hardly gone away in the twenty-first. Main Street is at once a social fact, a line, a limit. It is a sieve, a threshold, a myth. It is a speech act. “East of Main,” folks say, and that saying is a reminder that landscape is power materialized. Of how urban geography always contains within it such violent marks and brutal inscriptions. But beautiful fellowships, geographies of care, and senses of place are always cultivated in the midst of policy’s ongoing tendency to undermine Black places. In memories of home, and recollections of better days on the East Side, we can hear testimonies to a quality of life otherwise. Place names are not a dead end, like dead-ended Carlton Street cut in two by the exploded then sunken faultline of the NY-33.

Rather, a name is portal: an opening, a crossing. A name is a threshold. It is an inauguration that recovers. "I want you to remember Carlton Street,” I was admonished. A name is therefore also a calling. Aretha Franklin, the Gayles Family Singers, Olmsted, Daddy Grace, Maime Kirkland, Lucille Clifton, Connie Porter, Malcom X. Prince of Peace, First Shiloh, Bright Morningstar, Upper Room Church. Genesee, Johnson, Humboldt Parkway, Carlton, Sycamore, Vine St, Main. “The Ditch,” “the Divide,” “the Suburbs.” JJ Allen’s on William, Broadway Market, School 39, Sears, WUFO, the Rock Pile, Doris Records, BUILD. Like history, names can be forgotten or remembered. Like prayer, we name things both seen and unseen in an affirmation that nonetheless holds its mystery intact. Such testimonies map a past that made more sense and a present that remains beloved and “home.” It does this against a partial background of that home’s ongoing negation. Not a space indicative of dispossession but a social place that is repeatedly made through generosity and shared struggle. A way made out of no way. To begin a process of naming is an affirmation uttered sooner or later.

“The East Side” is a name. The question is, what does it name, and how, and for whom?

Why?

MY HEART IS A LAKESIDE CITY IN JANUARY

by Rachel Valente My heart is the big fish, the silver hook, and the hands that fight to reel it in, all at once.

She is a beer bottle elbowed off the side of a boat, adrift and learning the strangeness of the world.

So much is angular and blinding and terrific, piled and shapeshifting like Erie in the throes of wintertime.

When home calls me like a distant train whistle, my heart is turned echoing silo.

I couldn’t tell you what I am, but my heart is the place that raised her.

She knows how to dress for the cold.

She knows how to wait for the thaw.

OVER THE SKYWAY

by Theresa Wyatt I sing you, Great Lake, carved out of glacier ice with your fantastical moods of storm seiche and lightning flashes. You are a Whitman song of self, shimmering in Prussian blue, gifting us tributaries with sturgeon & trout.

Over the Skyway I sing you – to your bedrock shale that couches the thinning bones of storied shipwrecks, to your magnificent mist & gales that blow me home along the Seaway Trail, along creeks & harbors, secret waterfalls, wind turbines & river flats – all of you spectacular, all of you a masthead, breathtaking.