Gerry LaFemina

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Postcard to Evelyn Lau from a Bench in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor

Evelyn, light on the water and on the coins in the panhandler’s plate. Not even noon but already the buskers tune up their guitars, open up the bellows of their accordions only to release a long, randy drone. Sometimes all of life can be described by such a sound. Sure, there’s more interesting eye candy in this city, but here I sit watching the shoppers and young families, the tourists and old marrieds doing whatever it is people do to occupy their time in the United States, these early days of spring, the warm air carrying a switchblade of winter in its back pocket. I gave a dollar to a dandy playing violin, another to a guy with a dog and a sign: something about hard times, something about vets.  Veterans? Veterinarians? Who knows. I gave to them because they each had a look that can only be described as an ambivalent medley of resilience, heartache, and joy maybe peppered with rage. It’s a look, I know, we’d both recognize from the broken mirrors of memory, or else from a distant photograph we’d hope no one would ever find.        

Postcard to Charles Simic, from 6th Avenue, New York City

Charlie, what I remember is the one dinner we had the began on Hegel and ended on Miró, and the way you rhapsodized on the bechamel sauce. Oh, the bacchanalia of that evening, the wine and the pastries for dessert. What a chef does is a kind of alchemy. Ditto a poet. Ditto Cornell, who’d shown up somewhere after the Appolinian and Dionysian. Just minutes ago a bus passed me: SIM1C its route designation, and I knew it would take me, if I traced it stop by stop, back to Staten island from Manhattan, back to that place where I was raised. Childhood dinners of burnt grilled cheese. Schoolyard taunts. We’re all haunted by our youths, I know. I saw a boy get off that bus holding his mother’s hand. Then his grandfather bent forward like a chicken. The moon was out, full and heavy, like the night were pregnant, and the boy led them both toward an ice cream truck. Ice cream is a kind of alchemy. Also, a kind of melancholy.

Postcard to George Guida from a MacDougal Street Café

Dear George, so much in the City has changed but I can still hear some Kenny G wannabe play smooth jazz in the subways, and the pigeons still bob their heads as they walk, like the pious order of some ancient religion. Old women still talk about when the pope visited in 1979, but despite their nostalgia the City keeps reinventing itself, the way our bodies keep replacing cells—another café gone (moved to Dansville, no doubt) another bank branch moving in. The hipster writers have all rediscovered Brooklyn to make their artisanal poems. Forgive me if I sound bitter, trash talking like a point guard who’s lost a step or five and so sits longer along the fence between games. Fact is, I was never good at shirts vs skins, three-on-three. Fact is I miss the open mics at Smalls even though I dreaded them then. I liked the jazz afterward though, those old school bebop guys who blew cool straight out of 1957, cool so hot it made us sweat. And the bourbon, the color of a saxophone bell, brassy, a little tarnished, but aglow.

Postcard to Michael Waters from the Future Home of the Punk Rock Hall of Fame

Dear Michael, I was released the same year as Beggar’s Banquet, learned to walk the day Neil Armstrong took his small step. No wonder my life has been one long paragraph of rockets and rock-n-roll. No wonder we’re friends. I wanted to tell you I’m over the moon about the new Suzi Moon e.p. The poet in me likes the assonance of those two oo words, though I like, too, that she spells her first name like Suzi Quatro, my first rocker girl crush. Nothing coquettish about either of them. My inner adolescent likes the way Suzi Moon looks playing guitar, her eyes two moon rocks staring out, Joan Jett-ish. When I take the record off the turntable, I hold it to the lamp, create a mini eclipse in the living room.  Michael, I know you understand about the sound a guitar makes, how it can seem like the alimentary canal is a wormhole to some sunny pleasure center in the brain. So mean earworms take me there. The moon, bright through the window, casts alien light on the back lawn. It’s the same color as the soft hiss between songs. Point a radio telescope toward the lunar surface and you’ll get the same frequency.

Award-winning writer Gerry LaFemina is the author of over twenty books, most recently The Pursuit: A Meditation on Happiness (creative nonfiction) and Baby Steps for Doomsday Prepping (prose poems). His previous books include a novel, a collection of short stories, and numerous collections of poetry, including The Parakeets of Brooklyn, Vanishing Horizon, Little Heretic, and The Story of Ash. His essays on poets and prosody, Palpable Magic, came out on Stephen F Austin University Press and his textbook, Composing Poetry: A Guide to Writing Poems and Thinking Lyrically was released by Kendall Hunt. Among his awards and honors are a Pushcart Prize, a Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs Fellowship, and an Irving Gilmore Foundation grant. A noted literary arts activist who has served on the Board of Directors of the AWP and edited numerous literary journals and anthologies, LaFemina is the former director of the Center for Literary Arts at Frostburg State University, where he is a Professor of English, serves as a Mentor in the MFA Program at Carlow University and is a current Fulbright Specialist in Writing, Literature, and American Culture. In his “off” time he is the principal song writer and front man for Coffin Curse recording artists, The Downstrokes.

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