July 2019

VOL XXVII, Issue 7, Number 315

Editor: Klaus J. Gerken

European Editor: Mois Benarroch

Contributing Editor: Jack R. Wesdorp

Previous Associate Editors: Igal Koshevoy; Evan Light; Pedro Sena; Oswald Le Winter;

Heather Ferguson; Patrick White

ISSN 1480-6401

INTRODUCTION

Klaus J. Gerken

WINDOWS

CONTENTS

GEORGE GUIDA

The Return of Rose Romano

Michael Ceraolo

from Euclid Creek Book Four

Bob Ezergailis 5 poems

Julian O'Dea 3 poems

POST SCRIPTUM

Klaus J. Gerken

THE ROSE

Klaus J. Gerken

WINDOWS

Windows to each separation The heather collides with the sun The horizon forms prayers of sunset While lovers return to the one Who taught them like waves on the ocean To rise and to fall with a sigh I pity those exiles in limbo Who've written but got no reply She came like the spring to the meadow A bouquet of dew on the vine A scent of perfection that lingered Far longer than this poet's rhyme So you who have thought of conception Must rip away mask upon mask I pity those lovers in exile Who can never be up to the task

If no man can be just an island Each lie that we suffer is real As loneliness mounts each solution We're frightened of what is revealed I have no complete revelation Of what should be done in this case These lovers just exile each other And suffer for what's no disgrace

I can't comprehend so much beauty Revealed to a common design I pray to each god in high heaven To let me in her shade recline But gods have a habit ignoring What mortals desire out of life So leave all these lovers - their exile Refuses to conquer their strife

So if you must close all these windows Do so only for a very brief time Replenish the spent dissolution That has in your heart been confined Then open to radiant sunshine The world is not all made of stone With joy in our hearts and forgiveness Let these exiles return to their homes.

Copyright (c) Klaus J. Gerken 1986

GEORGE GUIDA New York City College of Technology, CUNY

The Return of Rose Romano

Nineteen-Eighties and 1990s multiculturalism multiplied by a considerable factor the number of

self-identified Italian American writers.1

Among them was Rose Romano, whose poems deserve a

prominent place in the Italian American literary canon. These poems helped shift the focus of Italian

American writing from cultural nostalgia and a sense of loss toward the examination of consciousness of

those feelings. This shift in focus registers the increasingly contested nature of Italian American ethnicity

and identity.

Both Romano and her poems suggest that Italian Americans are victims of their own superficially

successful assimilation into American society. On the one hand, “’Now it’s like we’re American enough

that we can afford to be Italian” (Romano, qtd. in Gardaphé 195); on the other hand, as several of her

speakers complain, it’s easy for Italian Americans to hide their ethnic identities, by camouflaging and

even rejecting them, to submerge themselves in the whiteness of mainstream U. S. culture, to assimilate

“at the cost of loss of cultural identity and even self-hatred” (Giunta 73). In less absolute terms we might

say that, by Romano’s lights, Italian Americans take the construction of their ethnicity either too lightly or

not lightly enough. They see Italian American folkways through veils of virtue: the way family members

lovingly prepare ragús for extended Sunday dinners, while telling themselves that “Americans” don’t

know good food and that such a meal is the best possible way to spend a Sunday. Or they lament the

erosion of these folkways by the centrifugal forces of American life: The family never gets together for

Sunday dinner anymore, because everybody has moved away or married out. When it comes to their

public images, they either laugh off or revel in portraits of loud families, grandmas in black, and

gangsters; or they resort to protesting these images, which protests, coming from a group as generally

well-established and powerful as Italian Americans, can’t help but seem petty and make them appear

subject to the quick temper and thin skin that have always been part of their stereotype.

In Fred Gardaphe’s 1988 profile of Romano for the Italian American newspaper, now magazine,

Fra Noi, Romano remarked that once she turned to the subject of “being Italian American” publishers

stopped publishing her work (194). She responded by launching la bella figura, a successful literary

magazine devoted entirely to writing by Italian American women, which she folded in 1992, the year of

the controversial Columbus quincentenary and the year of her move to Italy. Two years earlier Romano's

own malafemmina press had published her debut collection, Vendetta (1990), and in 1993 published its

follow-up, The Wop Factor. In 2016, malafemmina finally released a third volume of Romano's poems,

Neither Seen nor Heard, which collected the work of the two earlier volumes and added poems that to

that point either had appeared only in literary magazines or had been unpublished. The finest poems of

this oeuvre respond with ferocious satire to the whitewashing and the distortion of Italian American life

not only by other Americans but by Italian Americans themselves. The speakers of these poems skewer

misguided or reductive conceptions of Italian American life (90) and project the authentic and corrective

experience of singular Italian American identities.

1 This group of established and emerging writers included, among many others, Peter Carravetta, Gregory Corso, Antonio

D’Alfonso, Diane di Prima, Maria Famà, Paul Fericano, Fred Gardaphé, Sandra Gilbert, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Daniela Gioseffi, Rachel Guido DeVries, Gianna Patriarca, Gilbert Sorrentino, Felix Stefanile, Joseph Tusiani, Anthony Valerio, Paul Violi, Justin Vitiello, and Robert Viscusi, several of whom corresponded and gave occasional public readings with Romano.

In “Through the Alley” Romano mocks both Americans' sense of their culture's superiority and

their will to cultural hegemony.

Give up your culture

and I'll give you a

better one: mine.

Lighten up. For a little guilt

you can run the world. (Neither 128)

To counter such arrogance, she introduces the figure of her grandmother: not a sentimentalized vision of

nonna, but a woman whose very domesticity resists the hegemon.

A Neapolitan woman doesn't have time

to run the world. She prefers her

culture to yours. She has needs

you think are an untraceable poison,

feels pleasure you don't trust, follows

pain too far to worry about. A woman

like that can't be expected to see

the advantage of adopting your culture.

She stands on a balcony hanging

clothes, reaching out

to pin her disguise

on the line,

watching who passes through

the alley, knowing who's doing what to

each other, feeling the delicate changes

in status like knowing by color

when the spaghetti is done.

She's how I know when I'm home. (Neither 128)

As Romano masterfully extends the vivid metaphor, the old woman is “reaching out,” pinning “her

disguise,” vigilant in monitoring not only behavior, but also “delicate changes in status.” She is an icon of

Italian customs, and serves as a touchstone for their preservation and transformation. Her presence in

memory offers the speaker shelter from a mass cultural onslaught. For this shelter to continue beyond the

limits of the old woman's life, the speaker will have to assume a different disguise. The adaptation of

culture is a ceaseless, multigenerational process

Another name for cultural adaptation is ethnicity, “a process of awareness,” a recognition of one's

own cultural “needs” (D'Alfonso 186). Antonio D'Alfonso claims that living as an ethnic in a

“pluricultural” society exerting pressure on the ethnic to assimilate requires of the ethnic, to be an ethnic,

such awareness (186-188). The speaker of “Through the Alley” is on her way to achieving it. She

recognizes her grandmother's needs as expressed through simple acts, and recognizes her as “how I know

when I'm home” (Romano, Neither 128). The “when” of this statement, the temporal element, confirms

that ethnicity is a “process,” and, like hanging laundry, requires work. Romano places this previously

uncollected poem, written in 1991 and published shortly thereafter in The Pittsburgh Quarterly, near the

end of Neither Seen nor Heard, but it points us to one of the first poems in the new collection, and one

written earlier, “Confirmation (aka The Sauce Poem),” which appeared in Footwork (precursor of the

Paterson Literary Review) and then in Vendetta. It begins, “Every time I go there/she feeds me/until I feel

Italian again” (4). The potion for restoring Italianness turns out to be “sauce,” of the tomato variety,

reheated to make a dish called Eggs in Purgatory, an apt analogue for Italian Americans in a limbo of

their own difficult cultural reassessment and reinvention.

“Vendetta” and “Mutt Bitch” set a novel agenda for these last two processes and thus for the

representation of Italian American identity. “Vendetta” both protests American anti-Italian bias and

mocks nostalgia for the myth of Italian immigration. The poem begins with an example of Romano’s

“powerful critique of multiple systems of domination” (Mazzucchelli 299). The speaker contrasts

“Modern American women”’s (Romano, Neither 35) vocal claims to strength and independence with the

quieter strength of her grandmother.

Whose grandmother endangered her life,

her sanity, and her dignity, and gave up

her home, for freedom and the opportunity

to work eighteen hours a day,

six days a week?

Whose grandmother raised twelve children,

did all the cooking and cleaning,

washed the clothes by hand,

and, in her spare time,

ran her husband’s restaurant?

Whose grandmother couldn’t work

outside the home because she

had to watch her children and

had the neighbors pay her

to watch theirs while they worked? (35)

Through her use of epimone, Romano insists that Italian American society grounds itself in the agency of

its women, our real and metaphorical grandmothers. In the stanza that follows, the speaker moves from

intimation to protest expressed as personal frustration with the ways that Americans diminish Italian

American culture.

I’m tired of being cute.

I’m tired of being introduced by people

who think they’re amusing me

by adding an a to the end of

every word they say.

I’m tired of being expected to solve

all my problems with pasta

however efficacious that may be.

I’m tired of being overlooked and then

categorized as colorless,

as though I’ve never had

a good spaghetti fight in my life.

I’m tired of being told to

shut up and assimilate.

I’m tired of being stirred around

in a melting pot as though

I’m not a human being,

but a plum tomato. (35)

Through anaphora, a device Romano employs in other poems (Bona 166), she expresses frustration as a

means of calling attention to a culture misunderstood by “Americans,” and one whose distinction from

mainstream “white” American culture more aggrieved ethnic groups such as African Americans, Asian

Americans and Native Americans sometimes discount. In a remarkable third stanza, the speaker returns to

her grandmother again, who here is as much a part of the problem as a part of the solution.

Women into spirituality call on

African Goddesses, Asian Goddesses,

Native American Goddesses, while

Italian women kneel heavily

in the oppressive church of

organized religion.

Whose grandmother had a statue of

the Virgin Mary, Blessed Mother, Madonna,

Goddess on her dresser, a votive candle

before it and a crocheted scarf

under its feet?

Whose grandmother hung a rosary

from one corner of the mirror,

a scapular from the other, and

tucked a tiny palm cross into the bottom?

Whose grandmother worshipped

before an altar to honor the Goddess,

looking into the mirror at her own

reflection, herself an aspect

of the Goddess, as she tied her hair

tight at the back of her neck? (36)

Her grandmother, sung in fugue, publicly collaborates with the patriarchy and with mainstream American

culture, while keeping alive a true story of Italian women’s power and the power of Italian folkways. Her

religious practice symbolizes the presence of an ill-defined Italian American culture in American life, a

presence often reduced to stereotypes of Italian Americans as creatures of their passions (anger, lust,

gluttony) or as Mafiosi; most of these stereotypes pinned to ostensibly masculine behavior sometimes

projected onto Italian American women. In response the speaker takes a tone of outrage and then of

sarcasm.

I’m tired of being asked by insensitive fools

who get their news from movie star

gossip newspapers whether I know

anyone in the Mafia.

I’m tired of being assured by

know-nothing non-Italians that

every women’s bar in the

entire history of mankind

has been owned and operated

by the Mafia.

I’m tired of hearing the Mafia

referred to as the

Sicilian Brownies.

I’m tired of being expected

to apologize for the Mafia.

I’m tired of not knowing anyone

in the Mafia. (36)

She then rehearses a mock negation followed by a fairy tale.

Italians were not bought by the Padrone

when they arrived, were not kept

constantly in debt, did not live

under conditions worse here than

at home, were not raped, were not

lynched, were not run out of town.

Italians got up from their wine one day,

strolled to their yachts, sailed to the

piazzas of their cousins, opened

a chain of pizzerias, and danced

the tarantella all the way

to the bank. (37-38)

These lines respond to the negation of Italian American hardships in favor of immigrant success

mythology, to a process of identity-making (both by Italian Americans and other Americans) through the

commodification and consumption of elements of Italian culture reconstituted in America (Cinotto 3-5),

from “piazza” to “pizzeria.” Recounting the history of these hardships leads the speaker to a new

understanding of her family’s silence and secrecy about the reality of their lives.

In secrecy there is strength.

In secrecy there is survival.

In secrecy there is preservation

of a culture….

There is never a need to explain

ourselves to the non-Italian,

and there is often a need

to be silent.

Now there are those who think

that because they do not know us

we do not exist. (38)

This new understanding leaves her with a dilemma, the demonstration and explanation of which

preoccupy much of Romano’s poetry.

Now I’ve been told that Italians

have no history, no culture

beyond pasta and wine.

Now I’ve been told to be grateful

that I can pass for white.

Now I’ve been told to forget

everything and take advantage

of what the bland, apologetic,

constipated, gutless white culture

has to offer.

Now I’ve been told that the oppression

of my people is of no consequence

because we are neither dark enough

nor light enough to be a real people.

Now I’ve been told that our talent

for secrecy has been so well honed

we no longer exist. (39)

Romano’s speakers sometimes identify the people who have told them these things, but at other times

present composite mainstream straw people. In this way Romano more often focuses on disputes about

identity than, as poets like Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Daniela Gioseffi, and Gianna Patriarca do, on

incidents that define identity. In a number of her more direct and more lyrical poems, particularly in

“Public School No. 18, Paterson, New Jersey,” Mazziotti Gillan names these straw people, and relies on

the power of storytelling to reveal, in intimate terms, the challenges to Italian American identity in a

society that demands assimilation. Romano too recognizes that an identity long denied has to have been

denied by someone, someone with the cultural power and intent to suppress identities whose histories

complicate the mythology that immigrants

chose this land of opportunity

chose this land of plenty,

chose this land of freedom,

chose this land of respect

for different cultures. (37)

These people can be other Americans or Italian Americans themselves.

“Mutt Bitch” gives us a speaker who, like many of Romano’s personae, struggles to understand

and recast the nature and meaning of Italian American identity.

I’m Sicilian

I don’t remember

ever doing anything

that got me called

Italian. I grew up

thinking Naples

is in Northern Italy

Sicilians don’t want

me, either.

The few words

of Italian I know

are all Neapolitan.

I’m not serious

enough. I’m not

oppressed enough. I

haven’t been conquered

enough. I’m not Olive

enough. I may as well

be Italian. (31-32)

Whether or not Romano’s take on inter-regional biases among Italians and Italian Americans is, as

Mazzuchelli argues, “decidedly anachronistic” (305), she effectively explores the shadings of Italian

American identity through the lens of American identity politics.

The speaker of “The Family Dialect” carps, “I picked a fine time to be Italian” (Romano, Neither

49). That fine time is more a tide that threatens to submerge this free-floating Italian in a sea of

Americanness. For being Italian American, she stands accused of complicity in Columbus’s oppression of

indigenous Americans, by the descendants of those Americans. She laments, “just when being Italian-

American / wasn’t so embarrassing anymore, it got / embarrassing again” (50). She defends herself, and

by extension most Italian Americans, descendants of southern Italians, with another series of rhetorical

questions:

Does it matter to anyone here that

Columbus was a Northerner at

a time when there was not Italy?

Does it matter to anyone here

that Northerners have oppressed

Southerners and Sicilians in Italy,

in the United States, then, now

and forever?

***

Does it matter to anyone here

that Jews aren’t running to

apologize the way Italian-

Americans are? Does it matter

to anyone here that Italian-

Americans are so easy to shame

while others have too much

self-respect to fall for such

crap? (50-51)

Romano’s arch line breaks signal that Italian Americans are allowing themselves to be separated from

their Italianness (“Italian / Americans”) and portrayed as mainstream American inheritors of the Northern

European cultural colonialism. This sort of complaint about prejudice on the part of groups victimized by

colonialism and American imperialism took courage in the 1990s as it would today, and it distinguishes

Romano from predecessors such as Gioseffi and Diane di Prima, whose poems about identity most often

responded to white American repression. Much of Romano’s poem suggests that the “too much” other

ethnic groups have is a secure sense of difference in American society, a sentiment she locates in her

question about Jews, a group whose great-wave immigration to the U. S. paralleled that of Italian

Americans’. Her Italian Americans are denied both comfortable difference and comfortable assimilation.

Other of Romano’s speakers express a sense of shame for Italian Americans’ having hidden or

denied their cultural identities instead of celebrating them. The speaker of “Dago Street” claims both that

“Most Italians escape by hiding” (55) and that “Most Italians conclude / we shouldn’t have hidden / so

carelessly” (55). Romano favors this sort of comedic use of anaphora, epistrophe, epimone, and other

types of repetition and refrain, to highlight the constancy and absurdity of Italian Americans’ war on two

fronts: against people who disparage them as criminals and boors, unacceptable others; and against their

own unwillingness to call out such stereotyping. In “Dago Street” the speaker does just that, describing a

fellow lesbian who turns down a drink with her for a “date with this other woman” who is “so over

emotional, / she’s Italian—you know how they are— / she’d probably get the Mafia / after me” (56). No

minority, it seems, is immune to stereotyping another.

Responding to this reality, many of Romano’s poems are, at their core, activist poems. In the

1990s Romano was treading on thin ice by using two historically oppressed groups, Blacks and Jews, as

foils in her work,2 demonstrating that poetry, then as now, sometimes needs to ignore current political

taboos, to correct narratives about an ethnic group whose grievances and ethnicity 3 may be either

summarily dismissed or reduced to offensive shorthand. This shorthand features mention of the Mafia,

highlighting not only non-Italian Americans’ often cartoonish imaginings of Italian American culture, but

also Italian Americans’ own struggle to express their culture in a robust way, as they contend with what

Peter Carravetta calls the “stereoscopic sense of existence, the double life being lived/created” that “splits

the totalizing ontology of Self and Image” (91). Romano’s Italian Americans experience this “double

life,” as they inhabit a psychological, political and social limbo between oppressors and oppressed.

The twin specters of bias and assimilation stalk them and animate poems like “Only the

Americans,” in which American culture creeps into the speaker’s life as ghostly images in miniature, on

1950s and 1960s television programs.

The Americans were on TV—

they were the only ones smaller-

than-life enough to fit

the restrictions of that little box. (Romano, Neither 61)

Romano presents “Americans” as lacking the dimension and vitality of people who inhabited her

speaker’s “mixed neighborhood / in Brooklyn” where she lived

“Italian among the blacks, / The Puerto Ricans, the / Chinese, the Jews” and where

We all had short, round

grandmothers who filled

the streets between classroom

and kitchen with the smells

of cooking matched by no one. (61)

Again casting grandmother as totem, Romano draws a contrast between the women of recent immigrant

cultures and “American” grandmothers “who looked like ordinary women, / whose cooking didn’t smell /

and didn’t make a holiday” (61). For this sense of living a constant holiday, she claims, “I was grateful /

not to be American” (61).

The speaker of “Someone Please” echoes such gratitude and proudly identifies with ethnicity

over place of birth. “I know where I’m from and I like it” (62), she claims. Even though she is American,

born and raised in Brooklyn, she declares, “I’m telling people I’m originally from / the Kingdom of the

Two Sicilies” (62). Romano emphasizes the lingering power of the ancestral land, no matter how remote

in time and space, by calling southern Italy by its pre-Risorgimento and thus pre-modern name. The best

2 In his long poem “An Oration Upon the Most Recent Death of Christopher Columbus,” published in 1992, Robert Viscusi paints

a more nuanced picture of the dilemma Italian Americans face in continuing their relationship with Columbus and other received symbols of Italian American identity. The speaker of that poem, if it may be said to have a single speaker, remains ambivalent at the close of the mini-(mock) epic: innocent victims of innocent crime abuse us wherever we dream writing their signatures all across time and all that we wanted to seem the last of his crew Columbus now goes to whiten and fade on the beach as guilty as I am or you or who knows and that is the end of the speech (14) 3

defense against bias and assimilation is embrace of one’s heritage and disdain for the mainstream: in other

words, a good offense. Her contrasts of cultures may themselves be offensive to “Americans,” but they

are indispensable to making her point that each person in America should be allowed comfort in her

heritage and identity. People like Romano’s speakers should be left in peace to do the work that grows

naturally from their specific cultural perspectives. Her insistence on this point is both a strength and a

weakness of Romano’s poetry. In cleverly exposing the strategies designed to marginalize Italians and

women (particularly lesbians), her poems perform acts of resistance. At times, however, her rhetorical

offensive can crowd out appreciation of her poems’ subtleties: their insightful humor, complex line breaks

and use of repetition, and their treatment of complex feelings in brief scenes.

The last of these qualities is on full display in “Final Stages,” a lengthy lament for its speaker’s

ex-husband, a black man, who faces life-threatening illness.

And when your grandmother

died, she who had raised you, as

my grandmother raised me, the

women wailing, and you sitting

there trying not to cry. You used

to say you felt uncomfortable in

rooms full of white people. After

the funeral, back at your mother’s

house, I walked alone

into the living room, your grand-

mother’s friends sitting

around the walls. All talk stopped

and they turned and looked at

me, like they were thinking,

whose side of the family is she on.

Do you remember when I told

you about that, did it become

for you like it did for me,

one of those times in your

life that you save, the way

you put your arm around me and said,

you’re on my side of the family. (69)

The brilliance of this passage lies in the way the speaker navigates a maze of complex family and social

relations to find the intimate connection between two disconnected people. They are disconnected from

each other, and by virtue of race or gender, disconnected from others around them. They are trying to

make sense of their situations and trying to help each other make sense of them. Earlier in the poem, the

speaker reports,

I used to tell him

to look for a job. He said he wasn’t

qualified for a decent job, he was

an English major, and he was over-

qualified for the jobs they give to

blacks. I used to tell him

it only makes sense,

whatever you are,

whatever your situation,

you have a much better chance

of finding a job if you go out

and look for one than if

you don’t. Doesn’t that make

sense? (68-69)

Of course the sense it makes is common sense, the philosophical spine of Romano’s work, through which

run nerves that register the inadequacy of common sense in allaying people’s fears and overcoming

society’s inequities. When the speaker asks, “Doesn’t that make / sense?” her tone is both instructive and

wishful.

The tension between telling and hoping, between declaration and interrogation, between

insistence on common sense and expressions of wonderment, energizes Romano’s poems. While the

tendency of speakers to tell us what they think sometimes strikes strident notes, the poems transcend

declaration by seeking the truth of what speakers tell us and of what the people in her poems tell one

another. Sometimes they question earlier statements in the same poem and sometimes they force us to

question other of the poet’s poems (sometimes in the same volume) in which speakers present different or

even opposing perspectives on identity and identity politics. While speakers of the poems “Dago Street”

and “Someone Please” volubly object to stereotypes, the speaker of “Wop Talk” appears to question the

entire enterprise of objecting to stereotypes. This last poem in fact begins with the speaker’s appearing to

question the value of reading and writing at all.

Do you know

what it’s like

to find a book

that speaks to you,

that takes you in

and makes you real?

Well, I don’t. (71)

She is reacting to an activist writer’s talk (one sense of the poem’s title) about the American appropriation

of Italian culture. Her response?

What is wrong with this woman?

Why doesn’t’ she just shut up

if she’s so interested in Italian-

American traditions? I mean,

isn’t that one of their

traditions—to shut up? The rest

of them never say anything

and they’re doing fine. (71)

We might read the speaker as a culturally insensitive heckler in the back row, but the following two

stanzas take the poem from mockery, through philosophy and cultural history, to genuine humor-inflected

interrogation. Here the dangling hyphen after the word “Italian” hints at the poem’s take on the

celebration of Italianness in America, one that she apparently suggests may create an even greater

distance between self-identified Italian Americans’ dual and often dueling identities than Anthony

Tamburri claims the common signifier “Italian-American” does (To Hyphenate 47).34

43

I prefer the grammatically unconventional adjective “Italian American,” sans hyphen, to point out that the act of claiming a

dual identity does require one to embrace each distinct half in ways that do not always link it to the other half.

I can

understand why blacks talk about

being black or Asian-Americans

talk about being Asian-American—

they don’t exactly hide themselves

in a crowd

of white people.

But an Italian can

hide. An Italian-American is

becoming an American—that’s

what the hyphen means.

After just three generations

they’re almost rid of the

hyphen. A couple more

generations and they can drop

the word Italian. I mean,

why would anyone want to be

a minority if they don’t have to? (Romano, Neither 71)

In my experience hers is the overwhelming question for anyone who identifies as “Italian American” or

who swears allegiance to any other ethnic group commonly perceived as white.

The speaker goes on to describe the unnamed writer’s litany of cultural crimes against Italian

Americans, pausing a time or two to undermine her claims with comments like “I think / she’s been

eating / too much garlic” (72). But as the poem continues, she reveals more of the writer’s identity.

In the middle of everything

where it doesn’t belong

she mentions something

about being a dyke,

as if being a wop isn’t

enough.

She says she made

herself a t-shirt

that says—I’d rather be

eating. Somebody asked

her if the t-shirt was

supposed to Italian-

American or lesbian.

She said yeah. She thinks

everything is a poem. (76)

The final line of the second stanza alludes to Romano’s most anthemic poem, another first collected in

The Wop Factor, “There is Nothing in this World as Wonderful as an Italian-American Lesbian,” a

celebration of Italian American lesbian identity and culture. The allusion is one of many signals that the

speaker is taking the activist writer more seriously, gravitating toward her identity and her position as

what Tamburri would call a “hyphenate writer” (39). By the middle of the poem she is seeing beyond her

annoyance, acknowledging, “Nobody wants / to limit her. They just want / to limit what she says”

(Romano, Neither 78). By the end of the poem, the speaker has become a fellow hyphenate writer,

expressing by way of metaphor this sense of unity.

This woman is never

satisfied. Why isn’t

she excited to have

her name in the

newspaper?

Give her a

column inch and she

wants an article.

I remember when I

had this crummy apartment

in a slummy neighborhood

in Brooklyn. The landlord

asked me one day if

I was getting enough

hot water. I said

yeah.

After that

I didn’t get as

much hot water

anymore. (80)

In a single poem Romano demonstrates the logic of activist writing vis-à-vis the denial of ethnic identity.

Even as her speaker questions the terms of such activism, she reaches the conclusion that overcoming bias

and its effects means never giving into complacency or cynicism. Comfortable ethnic identity in America

requires insistence upon self-definition.

We could assume Romano’s body of work reflected an unwavering belief in this position, were

we to read only the poems in Neither Seen nor Heard that also appeared in her two earlier collections;

however, in the section “poems from journals—Their Way Home” we find “Woman in an Attic,”

(published in the 1990s in Footwork), which questions the possibility of meaningful ethnic self-definition

in a society of, as Simone Cinotto describes them, “postmodern consumers” free to “fashion their

individual selves through selective consumption of a multifarious variety of goods and experiences” in

“new institutions and sites of consumption” including “themed environments” (5). The poem’s setting is

one such themed environment, the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration. The speaker visits this

museum with her young daughter in a scene that enacts the attempt to transmit heritage from one

generation to the next. As she enters she tries “to feel the hard floor through / the worn soles of my

sneakers, / the floor my grandparents walked / on, try to feel their energy” (Romano, Neither 133),

straining to create a genuine connection with her ancestors and with their lives. Instead of feeling the

ancestors’ energy, she finds a leaflet advertising the opportunity to have her family name inscribed on a

wall, for a fee. On the cover of the leaflet are

purple-brown people just out

of their graves, standing like sticks,

grasping at babies and bags, eyes

accusing, about to step forward,

ready to snatch us up when we’re

not looking and carry us back where

we belong. (133)

This disturbing image of zombie immigrants insinuates that the speaker’s quest is a form of grave robbing

that can only help to create a Frankenstein’s monster of identity. These people are not her ancestors, but

rather ghoulish strangers dispatched by the United States Government to “carry us back where we

belong” from a place that, according to the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation Website, is “the only

place in the United States where an individual can honor his or her family heritage at a National

Monument.” In other words, the speaker has walked into a consumerist American identity trap, in which

“the nationalist discourse is partly constructed through consuming the ethnicity of minority groups…by

consuming the cultural diversity of the minority group through a narrative process of ‘othering’

(Kirshenblatt-Gimblatt, qtd. in Cinotto 5). The immigrants in the brochure are not only other, but also

nameless and dead. Only a “donation” or “contribution” (“About the American”) to the American

national narrative of immigration can rename, revive and de-other their revenants, while in the process

asking the descendants of immigrants to consume otherness so that they themselves, like zombies, can

become more other. These descendants, like the speaker, are allowed to create an imaginary in which they

go back to the place where they think they belong, as, ironically, they become, in their consuming of

ethnic culture, ever more American, as the daughter exclaims, “Look, Ma! Samsonite! Another one of our

/ family names!” (134).

In this way, as the speaker and her daughter move through the museum, they learn that “an ethnic

slur / can be a subtle thing” (135), such as a graphic depiction arranged to dehumanize and denature

ethnic forbears.

Pictures endless around the walls, giant

faces with huge eyes, peeling tenements,

front pages of ethnic newspapers, sweat-

shops, crowded streets, fire escapes,

crying babies, horses, vegetable bins,

the noise, the clutter, the lost. You’ve

seen these images before, in books and

magazines, on other walls, in other

places, in other rooms, in other lives,

in different sizes, different areas blown

up and centered, now brown, now black,

now purple, until you recognize people

you’ve never seen before and forget

the people you’ve seen, and you wonder

why they couldn’t find enough pictures

to fill a small museum without repeating,

over and over and over. (135)

Romano’s cataloging of visual images emphasizes the museum’s “concentration on the known, the

familiar, as though reality and history were a mantra that could make everything safe if simply repeated

often enough” (Gardaphè, Leaving 159): safe not only for Americans in general, but for Italian

Americans and other descendants of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century immigrants, who so

desire a usable ethnic past that they will participate in the homogenization of history.

The museum is designed to inculcate a sense that the American immigration experience amounts

to a set of reproducible and consumable types and artifacts, not to a multitude of experiences and

identities. The cafeteria “serves food from / every culture that passed through / here, but only the fastest /

food, only dishes easy to carry,” which reminds the speaker of “the aquarium / cafeteria that sells fish /

salad” (Romano, Neither 135). In the museum’s gift shop, the speaker discovers

You

can get good stuff here, all of it

new—genuine imported heritage,

videos, maps, plates, coins, pens, and

the flags—flag lapel pins, flag

decals, flag placemats, flag patches,

flag bumperstickers, even little flag

flags with little flag stands.

In the Ellis Island coloring book you

can color immigrants slumped

exhausted on a bench “dreaming of a

brighter future,” immigrants enjoying

the sun and air while “traveling in

steerage,” smiling, carefree immigrants

“arriving at Ellis Island.” And the

activities—find a path through the

maze from Ellis Island to Manhattan

and “guide the immigrants through

processing,” fill in the squares with

the nationalities of your grandparents,

and, maybe one activity worth trying,

in their own frames of hats, hair

and collars, “draw the faces of

these immigrants.” (136)

Romano finds a way to nullify the pitch of “genuine imported heritage” and a more meaningful way to

“‘draw the faces of / these immigrants,” a way to humanize them and interrupt her speaker’s experience

of sanitized immigration, by appropriating quotations from individual immigrants, posted throughout the

museum and intended to authenticate a contrived composite experience. She intersperses these quotations

as discreet stanzas within the otherwise narrative poem, to disrupt the museum’s insistence on its story,

which is manifest in phrases throughout: “There are voices in every room, / accents for every

childhood…The food room says…Imagine a dollar...Imagine a fifth of a week’s pay for one lunch…Go

look at the display…Listen to a child’s tears / in an old woman’s voice” (134-135). Instead of succumbing

to the allure of tidy ethnic history, her speaker recognizes the need to acknowledge each immigrant’s

unique identity and humanity, recasting the museum experience in a pair of images both homely and

familiar.

a museum is just an attic,

where we keep things even if we can’t

find a practical use for them because

they make us too real to throw away.

On the boat on the way to Manhattan,

we stand at the rail in the dark,

looking out at the Statue of Liberty.

From where I’m standing, it looks like

she’s scratching her armpit. I tell my

daughter and we laugh all the way home. (137)

The reception of these lines depends on our understanding of the word “us.” Does “us” refer to all

Americans, to Americans who feel a sense of ethnic difference, however undefined, or only to the

descendants of Ellis Island immigrants per se? In context of Romano’s oeuvre, the second possibility

makes the most sense. By paying attention to the direct language and experience of unique immigrants,

the speaker is able to turn what could be an experience of disillusionment into one of deeper

understanding and validation of her ethnic consciousness. She not only translates the museum into a

repository of intimate memories, but also humanizes and demystifies the icons of American immigration

mythology.

Like many of Romano’s strongest poems, “Woman in the Attic” responds to the commodification

of immigrant and ethnic culture in the wake of post-1960s ethnic activism. This activism itself responded

to the hiding and forgetting of culture that so many of Romano’s poems lament. Her antidote is to write,

as the title of her latest volume suggests, from a space of invisibility and silence; to emerge from this

space; to enact that emergence in the language of “people who are left out” (Romano, “Re: You asked for

it”) of the American narrative of assimilation and resistance to assimilation; to record, in verse, the

experience and especially the contested consciousness of a lived ethnic past and present. This strategy

puts the lie to the very American idea that we can define a culture through a single symbolic assemblage

of artifacts and behaviors. It suggests instead that any notion of ethnicity must account for “multiple

identities” within an ethnic group and within an “ethnic” individual (Gardaphè, Leaving 159). Her poetry

reflects the belief that in writing about a culture, a writer must have lived it and must honor it; and that in

doing so, she must challenge the idea of a cultural or literary mainstream or mainstreams. This

proposition has defined the central point of debate over the American literary canon, the way that Rose

Romano’s poetry has defined a post-modern approach to both Italian American poetry and Italian

American consciousness.

Works Cited

“About the American Immigrant Wall of Honor®,” The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island

Foundation, The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, 2018,

www.libertyellisfoundation.org/about-the-wall-of-honor

Bona, Mary Jo. “Learning to Speak Doubly: New Poems by Gianna Patriarca and

Rose Romano,” Voices in Italian Americana 6.1 (Spring 1995): 161-168.

Carravetta, Peter. After Identity: Migrations, Critique, Italian American Culture.

Bordighera Press, 2017.

Cinotto, Simone. “All Things Italian: Italian American Consumers and the

Commodification of Difference.” Voices in Italian Americana, vol. 21, no. 1, 2010,

pp. 3-44. Print.

D’Alfonso, Antonio. In Italics: In Defense of Ethnicity. Guernica Editions, 1996.

Gardaphé, Fred. Dagoes Read: Tradition and the Italian/American Writer.

Guernica Editions, 1996.

---. Leaving Little Italy: Essaying Italian American Culture. SUNY Press, 2004.

Gillan, Maria Mazziotti. Where I Come From. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 1995.

Giunta, Edvige. Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors.

Palgrave, 2002.

Mazzucchelli, Chiara. “’The Scum of the Scum of the Scum’: Rose Romano’s Search for

Sisterhood.” The Journal of Lesbian Studies, vol. 18, 2014, pp. 298-309. Print.

Romano, Rose. “The First Scent.” Sinister Wisdom 31 (1987): 37.

---. Neither Seen nor Heard: A Selection of Poems. malafemmina press, 2016.

---. “Re: You asked for it.” Message to George Guida. 2 May 2017. Email.

---. The WOP Factor. malafemmina press, 1994.

---. Vendetta. malafemmina press, 1990.

Tamburri, Anthony J. To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate: The Italian /American Writer:

An Other American. Montreal: Guernica Editions, 1991

Viscusi, Robert. An Oration upon the Most Recent Death of Christopher Columbus.

Bordighera Press, 1993.

George Guida is the author of eight books, including two volumes of critical essays, The Peasant and the Pen: Men, Enterprise, and the Recovery of Culture in Italian American Narrative (Peter Lang, 2003) and Spectacles of Themselves: Essays in Italian American Popular Culture and Literature (Bordighera Press, 2016). His two latest collections of poems, Zen of Pop (Long Sky Media) and a revised edition of New York and Other Lovers (Encircle Publications) will appear in 2020. He teaches writing, literature and cultural studies at New York City College of Technology, and serves as Senior Advisory Editor to 2 Bridges Review.

Michael Ceraolo from Euclid Creek Book Four "Prematurity" "Lecture by Thomas Mann, Nobel Prize winner: Public Music Hall, Cleveland May 1st , 8:30 p,m. : under auspices of the League for Human Rights: subject: "The coming victory of democracy" " The year was 1938, and Claire Payne, 22, who had biked 142 miles from Worthington, Ohio, was in the audience of 3,400 people who heard Mann say, among other things: "Fascism woos by the charm of novelty of a false dawn for the hopes of youth, and aims to perpetuate itself by the age-old means of might" thus "If democracy is to stand up against it, there must be no mistake as to the evilness of the new thing which has entered the world" (the full text of the lecture can be read in Mann's book with the lecture's title) Mann also announced he planned to seek American citizenship, because "I simply believe that for the duration of the present European dark age, America is to support, and is willing to take care of, western culture and civilization" There is no record of any demonstration by Cleveland Nazis against Mann's appearance (probably because of his prestige worldwide, and because he couldn't be hit with the usual smears) There are instance of demonstrations against the Cleveland Nazis, particularly apt because Oberleutnant Walter Kappe

began the campaign of Nazi infiltration of America here in Cleveland in the mid-1920s Whether the demonstrators knew of Kappe or not, here are some of the actions, going back from a few months to several years before Mann's appearance: February 15, 1938 The Manz Gardens 950 East 69th Street, a hall "decorated with American and bund flags and two illuminated swastikas" where "200 Here Ignore Threat to Listen to Bund's Agent" while the real threat was proclaimed in the headlines at the top of the page: Hitler's domination of Austria and November 13, 1937 A Nazi rally at the Sons of Italy auditorium 7218 Euclid Avenue Posters promoting the rally showed a sketch of American Nazi leader FRITZ KUHN and advertised an admission price of thirty-five cents A broad-based coalition of what would later be smeared as premature anti-fascism: members of the CIO, members of a Jewish Citizen's Committee, members of German-American workers' organizations, shouted "go back to your concentration camps" "bloodsuckers" "baby killers" and other epithets and slogans, and loudly booed the local Nazis who dared to show their faces from a balcony and September 18, 1934 According to the next day's newspaper report

a crowd of 400 attended the rally, while "Anti-Nazi demonstrators numbering almost 2,000 last night failed to break up a meeting of the Cleveland branch of the League of the Friends of New Germany at the Socialer Turnverein, 3919 Lorain Avenue" shouting "Down with Hitler" "Down with the Nazis" And the local branch of the League for Human Rights, founded in 1933, used undercover investigators to spy on clandestine meetings often held in people's homes I wonder how many of the participants in the various demonstrations against the Nazis did indeed suffer in later decades from having been deemed "guilty" of "premature anti-fascism"

Thanksgiving Weekend 1950 In the holiday paper: dozens of pages of ads, an article about the upcoming high-school football city championship game ("Charity Grid Field to be Fast"), and on page 63, the weather forecast: "Cloudy with occasional rain and milder today" "Expected high today 42, low tonight 20" And the city went about the business of celebrating the holiday Friday's paper: "Clevelanders were given a respite . . .yesterday as expected rains avoided this area" But as told on the front page, today wouldn't be quite as nice: "Snow, Wind Chill to Hit City Today With Wintry Blast" and inside the paper the forecast called for "snow flurries this morning and during the day" "Saturday partly cloudy with a few snow flurries" And thousands of area people didn't let such a forecast deter them from their daily tasks, whether work, holiday shopping, etc. "What Happens When Tons of Snow Whip Out of Nowhere to Bury City" and that question was answered in the next several days' papers Saturday's paper: "CITY BATTLES SNOW AND RECORD COLD" "Heavy snow today accumulating to about 12 inches by noon" and some weather bureaucrat's statement that only three inches of snow fell Friday was belied by the reports elsewhere in the paper of abandoned cars, of long traffic delays for trains, streetcars, and buses (the various different bus systems would not be consolidated into one countywide system until the mid-1970s), of the power outages (including one at a hospital) and the difficulty restoring the power Four hardy people would visit the Cleveland Zoo today

No customers showed up at one downtown department store and only a few customers at another downtown department store, so the stores closed and the employees went home Sunday's paper: "ALL FORCES TOIL TO CLEAR CITY; SOLDIERS CALLED IN" to help cope with the declared state of emergency: the soldiers used a Sherman tank to clear a path on the Shoreway so 50 stranded motorists could move again; the soldiers also arrested looters And they nearly scared to death a man who, for reasons known only to himself, decided to sleep through the storm on someone else's front porch "Charity Game Casualty of Storm's Fury" A bakery truck stalled in a snowdrift decided to open up shop right there for fellow strandees: its wares sold out in a few minutes Monday's paper: "CITY STRUGGLING OUT OF DRIFTS; THREAT OF MORE SNOW EASES" "FALL IS 20.2 INCHES" "10,000 Cars Abandoned" and seemingly that many stores about the continuing efforts at snow removal And Tuesday's paper: "CLEVELAND DIGGING BACK TO LIFE" "Business Loss Estimated at $12,000,000" and things slowly returned to normal (A later book about the storm said that things had returned to normal by Friday, November 31st, but I question that) The storm's area-wide death toll was twenty-three; no word if the front-porch sleeping beauty was among them

Stages I don't know if deer consider the world a stage as Shakespeare did, but on one day in the watershed I saw several parts in their play of life: early in the morning in my backyard (deer like my yard, front and back, because it's safe for them to eat) the two youngest deer I've ever seen (never having attended a deer birth) They were somewhat unsteady on their feet, and so small I would have thought them a different species had not their protective mother been with them; later, near one of the creek's tributaries I saw two more-grown deer scouting a vacant lot to see if it was safe to eat there; still later, while driving on the freeway, I saw two adolescent deer testing the boundaries of safety (whether intentionally or unintentionally I leave it to the deer behaviorists to determine); one, a little bolder than the other, made it to the should before turning around (I had slowed way down, unsure if the deer would come onto the highway, and was doubly thankful: first, that I did not hit the deer; and second, that the driver behind me did not hit me) And lastly, a little ways down the freeway after the close encounter, I saw on the side of the road a less fortunate deer, one sans life

A Hidden Mansion In late 1998 I was part of the crew that responded to a house fire in a neighboring city: roofers had caught the roof on fire when heating tar to spread The address was 1404 Dorsh Road As we came down the street we were directed onto a driveway running between two other houses: the house was a mansion sitting behind the other houses on the street There was nothing truly memorable about the fire: it hadn't spread much inside, no one needed to be rescued, no special firefighting challenges, except for the fact that the house had a lot of collectibles, which we did our best not to damage But I had grown up in the area, walking down that stretch of Dorsh hundreds of times at least, and this was the first I knew of the hidden mansion, and I resolved to learn more about it at a later date My second encounter, an indirect one, came a little over a decade later when I read in the newspaper the obituary of Dr. Olgierd Lindan, the owner of the mansion (he deserves a full biography for his extraordinary life) What I also learned that day was that many of the collectibles we saw were examples of medical quackery devices Next I read of his wife, Dr. Rosemary Jackson Lindan, and her death four years after her husband (she is also deserving of a full-length biography for her extraordinary life) And last I learned about the mansion itself: built on the east side of the creek in 1919, almost a decade before the more famous Telling mansion was built on the west side It is almost 5,000 square feet

on a lot almost 5 acres, and the house is still on the market in the spring of 2019 It is far outside of a poet's price range Maybe make it into a museum for the collection of medical quackery devices?

Reclamation Update (2019) The barbed wire is gone, as is most of the exterior fencing on which it sat, there being two exceptions: a fence to prevent pedestrians from plunging into the pond created by damming the creek under Richmond Road, and a fence to prevent those outside the park from falling down a steep embankment; there is no fencing by the high-end houses newly built just outside the northeastern end of the park There is a rock with a plaque on it, said plaque donated by a couple married in 1980, possibly on that very spot Some sections of the asphalt trails have been removed, and replaced with gravel or hard-packed dirt, and marked on park maps as "natural-surface" trails The hill where we once sledded no longer has an artificial flat surface used as a putting green, but has gone back to a natural rolling hill, rolling down to newly uncovered creek; in fact, most of the creek is now uncovered Some dead trees remain unburied and unremoved, slowly going back to the ground they once came from, but hundreds of new trees, mostly maples and oaks, have been planted, all with stakes tied to them and some also with cylinder-shaped fencing around them to help them reach adulthood When it was first converted to a park you didn't have to stay on the trails:

you could go from one point to another by cutting across neatly-manicured grasses of the former course, but reclamation involves a trade-off: now the grass is cut only for an area around where the main trail starts; on the side trail, and a little ways in on the main one, the grass is only cut about four feet back from the sides of the path (and a little more around the benches and leading to the gazebo) The rest is left to grow naturally, left to be colonized by other plants blown in or dropped by birds visiting the new birdhouses, and left to be reclaimed in places by returning wetlands And as there are now few if any acacias (and maybe never were there any) reclaiming by renaming the park still remains to take place

Bob Ezergailis

170619A

Kept to wavering

on the edge

of various extinctions.

A pick or choose

between left over conditions.

The quantities are limited,

and may not be available,

at all locations.

Can't we get anything else ?

It was the same

at every previous stop.

They never had anything

that we really wanted.

Pop the top

and listen to whatever it is

that is screaming escape.

Secrets dribbling out,

over the hard metal edge,

ending absorbed

on the tips of tongues.

Everyone pretending

that they heard nothing said.

The conversation moves over

to continue in the wheel well;

gathering momentum.

Drizzle of forever,

combing out memories

from yesterday's hair.

They made it seem so necessary;

carefully organized,

with everything being labelled.

The sort of poetry

that is meant to be chanted

when in a condition of doubt.

Liturgy of doubts

reverberates in hollows,

scooped free of content.

Perpetual emulations

simulated by substance,

fostering new terms of abuse

definitive of mass conscious

empty packaging,

under fashionable wraps.

Watching the gamblers,

grabbing flesh arms

of slot machines.

The smell of jack pot

drifts in between

cash and concrete,

to cloud up various losses.

Another dip

into a dance with emptiness.

170619B

Nothing ordinary worth saying,

so say nothing,

expecting no extraordinary replies

to anything on the day's menu.

Eat it all up,

until additively choked,

unable to swallow any more.

They will laugh at you,

after you walk out.

Outside takes your breath

squirrelling it away,

into scratch and sniff packets,

left for guessing

which drug and what sex,

dogs are licking

off the sidewalk.

No one notices your ghost

cutting estranged air.

Government agents,

working the street corners

recognize your face.

They look to get attention,

recording whereabouts,

with all the guile and zeal

of tax collectors;

actresses accumulating trophies,

and barmaids getting tipped.

Ambulance at the library,

conducting a recovery

as to what slipped and fell

between the pages.

Cover up the ink smear

and carry it out,

last chapter under a sheet,

complete with needle marks,

inserted between lines.

Spending habits,

among broken automatons,

being consumed,

to falling short of valued,

disregarded particulars

of anything you love.

Remains kept carefully aside

in a traumatized daze,

severely marked down condition.

All the futile searches,

that occupied time. Proving nothing warranted

as to any interests in common

being procured.

The emptied out expressions

of what persist,

maintained in a sorry state,

continuation of decline.

Something gone rotten,

before anything came of it.

It took far too long,

to realize

the trends were changed

in all the windows.

Left standing out,

with a bag full of wrong,

forever getting dumped.

200619A

Another deranged morning,

of beating at the walls,

trying to tear something down,

if only to get by and get through.

What you were told was a blessing

turned out to be the curse.

Scars you up,

into a permanent discard.

Your open book existence,

covers torn away,

and publicly read

to exemplify bad pulp fiction.

Flip a coin

calling that a romance novel.

Dear diary,

there is nothing left to tell.

Everyone is bored to death,

before any meeting is arranged.

It simplifies scheduling,

leaving nothing but opportunity.

Cohabiting with imagination

but it keeps wanting to leave,

so it can run wild,

terrorizing with that much isolation.

Fallen from the lists,

with no way to settle any score,

your whole game goes tilt

back to reset mode.

You get nothing that way,

but put another coin in,

diminished down to a feeling

nothing will light up again.

Whatever it was

no one actually wanted any.

When it looks that bitten on

even a dog does not want to chew.

200619B

That feeling you get given to,

when there are no right places left,

and the wrong places won't.

You wander around in make believe,

of hopeless at find something.

Loose ends of pretend a life,

presenting a tatter sort of existence,

concerning rumoured possibilities

mostly made up, tough to imagine

having any relation to chance.

If anything actually appealed,

it was torn away,

exposing more ugliness

floated to a surface bloat

of trauma induced regret.

Not much to choose,

between causes of death,

so it turns to random pick.

Telephone rings,

causing another reluctant leap.

Tangled up in the hoops

you failed to jump through,

you get a commercial message,

that hangs up

as quickly as it dialed.

You want to go back

to before the beginning,

so you can turn over,

to sleep through it all,

hoping something changes.

200619C

Every passing garbage truck

seems to be hauling away,

another compressed instant,

completely crushed,

to dripping something

popped out from eyes,

tongue shoved back into throat,

where words choke up

melded into ignored ravings.

There never were any answers,

and I do not know the questions.

Everything continually changes

into the same as it ever was.

Breaking free of reflections

gets you the same bad luck

to add to what was accumulated.

Something to remember

as to what you have nothing of.

It becomes a long list,

tossed around between diversions.

Picking at a rubbish heap of dreamt,

pure chance bits and pieces,

meant to plug some of the gaps.

The emptied out feeling expanding

the way a sea of flood expands

to filling over entire horizons

with spills of futile gesture.

No one to be held accountable

for gone down the drain.

No one really cared that much

as to stepping into line,

for the sake of filling in a blank.

No sand bagging efforts

shoring up anything of value

to protect from the hungry ravages

decomposing of mindscapes.

-------------------------------------

New species of loneliness that you probably never dared to explore anything of, in our desolate wasteland of

never anything but something ever more contrary.

Julian O'Dea

China's Sorrow

The last female Yangtze giant softshell turtle has died, captive; no more to help carry the world on her back, or bear magic tales; gone from the river now like an old gunboat, too soft-shelled for the times; one less dragon swims in China, which is losing the Mandate of Heaven.

The Best Dog

Like a big friendly dog by my side, even in winter the sun warms me through the window, lolling around all day, never rising high in the sky, counting the hours, waiting to return to his night-time kennel; a golden retriever, leaving his moon ball out at night.

South Coast Lakes

The long series of sombre lakes filled my teenage mind on holidays, landlocked and confined, not then open to the ocean.

By sandy paths through coastal shrub, I walked and lay on dunes and watched the waves like a repeated question, when can they come in?

Then one time with a girl with a face like a secret promise, we found the bar was breached, the lakes opened to the sea, and fresh and salt flowed free in answer to the patient waves.

Klaus J. Gerken

THE ROSE

i cannot deny an arrangement that shattered what dead men reveal the living can no more reclaim it than a raft could be made out of steel

it's the tale of an angel that wandered

from the realms of the heavens to hell

were this angel not love i'd deny her

for she left me alone when i fell

i stumbled upon a commitment

which made her and i into one

body and soul knit together

tight as the tightest of bonds

but somehow through time's interaction

somehow through love that was lost

somehow through greed and it's savior

we bargained and ventured the cost

the night is as dark as it's ugly

the bed is surprisingly cruel

no blanket to warm this reaction

no lover to wake up this fool

the dream of a rose turns to anger

when the rosebushes gather a crown

and this madman adrift on a feather

swallows his pride just to drown

a broken love

a token love

a flavour of what has been lost

tell me my love

what is above

and what is revealed in the frost?

Copyright (c) 1989 Klaus J. Gerken

All selections are copyrighted by their respective authors.

Any reproduction of these poems, without the express written permission of the authors, is

prohibited.

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