Two Women I Can’t Stop Thinking About
The first has an MBA and teaches Social Media Marketing for Business, Entrepreneurship, and Business Problem Solving. Someone at work said she voted for Trump. She concludes all her emails with the same line:
MAKE IT A GREAT DAY!The second is Hope (no symbolism; the newspaper said that’s her last name). No MBA or undergrad degree. She believes her son is dead but Portland police disagree: reported sightings on Marginal Way and Temple Street. She doesn’t believe it’s him. He’d have been arrested
again by now. He’s dead and his body is probably behind her Westbrook house in thick woods she and family searched for two months. Police say the reported sightings are credible so no cadaver dog to help out. Has the first woman seen this
story among the local paper’s articles about random misfortune the unfortunate find or seek? Hope’s son left the house shoeless after saying everything would be okay again despite anxiety, depression, history of drug use, a terrible addicted father. He couldn’t have gone far. The police won’t listen, but at least they don’t tell her to make her day great.
A Thank You Note to Thomas Mann
Yeah, I know he’s dead so I’ll write a poem instead. First try at The Magic Mountain I only read 500 pages. Fall semester was beginning and I had Teacher Quotidian to worry about. Plus I’d just finished The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina that summer, already
2000 plus pages in the Bank of Learning to Cope 6 months after my sister’s cancer death as I prepared to raise my 12—year old niece and save my 18—year old nephew from the overdose only 13 Years away.
I had enough mountains, none magic that tragic fall. But I’d try again and succeed 15 years later – read the same 500 plus 300 more pages – and know Mann was right; there was no magic in places we wish it were.
My pristine childhood home, a Maine island now belonged to newbies who started a weekly paper they passed out on the ferry. One author wrote, “We islanders” amid a mini op-ed about discovering
THE WAY mainland Mainers couldn’t know though this writer would soon leave his wife and 4 kids for no more ferry rides and she would write a piece for the same weekly about Jonathan Livingston Seagull and the importance of FREEDOM.
which she believed could be found even when summer ended, the island community condemned to a winter boat schedule, early darkness, and cold that didn’t seem to bother all the new magic mountaineers.
The converted had adopted this seasonally forlorn place, a perennial summer escape for those with money regardless whether their Wisdom accounts were full or empty.
Righteous Popcorn
Carol Bresovsky was the prettiest girl between Mon City and Uniontown
when the late David Ruffin kissed her on the cheek in California, PA
where the state college was featuring him at the Homecoming concert.
Carol was Homecoming Queen and came on stage to receive a bouquet
from David today described as a tenor by Wikipedia but a baritone
by Newsweek (though both describe his 100 best of all time voices
as “anguished”). Carol’s boyfriend was a Sig Tau, but those white boys
had to sit in the audience and accept the quick cheek peck though I’d
always wonder what would have happened had her boyfriend been a
TKE. I was the fat nobody running the spotlight for David’s show, trying
to accept that he was no long a Temp, not knowing in 1969 he’d die
in 1991 because of drugs. I’d run the light for Jay and the Americans
Eric Burdon and War & others as a work-study gig that earned the best
seat in Hamer Hall (the college gym). Johnny Mathis had sung here
and Cassius Clay had once arrived with his new name to give a speech
in the same gym where a kid nicknamed Ahab once cavorted among
the bleachers like a ballet dancer because he was on LSD. I can’t
remember the noun Ed LaCotta, former coalminer now facilities
worker for the college, attached to him when Ed said they needed
to get that “Goddamn forgotten noun out of the building.”
Girls were party toys either for real or in fantasy. Many white
guys hated black guys, still stunned a random cracker had killed
MLK Jr, his name soon to be affixed to dangerous urban streets
I didn’t have much hope as a doctor said I had Marie-Strumpell
Arthritis. He called it the “frozen disease.” America said we
couldn’t graduate without attending the ceremony in caps &
gowns. One of my pals, pissed he couldn’t spend Saturday
afternoon riding his motorcycle through Long Branch, Roscoe, and
Stockwell, taped a peace sign to his cap, as did many others.
I’d never sing like David Ruffin or run like O.J. Simpson, but a
different doctor said I had something else and was getting better.
After graduation I wore a lime green uniform as a beer vendor
at Three Rivers Stadium. The back of my shirt said, “ZUM ZUM.”
A girl I’d gone to college with spotted me one night, laughed,
pointed, said “Sweeney, you’re a ZUM ZUM.”
Two years later she’d jump off the Brownsville bridge because
she wasn’t as pretty as Carol Bresovsky while I was living an
enlightened life in western Massachusetts with bookstores,
food-coops, vegetarian lesbians, movies with subtitles.
One night at Three Rivers it rained, the wind blew and vendors
didn’t make much money. It was too cold to drink Iron City
or Duquesne, but one black kid from Gladstone High School
said to another that he shouldn’t complain. “What you mean?
You saw a ball game for free and got to eat some righteous popcorn.”
What more can we ask?
Kevin Sweeney’s latest book is Imminent Tribulations from Moon Pie Press. He has taught at Southern Maine Community College since 1983 and is an assistant poetry editor at the Café Review for which he has done interviews with poets Carl Dennis, Kim Addonizio, Martin Esapda, Gerald Locklin, William Carpenter, and Margaret Randall.