Transfiguration*

October 2019 | poetry

Mrs., your daughter fits Fifty-Fourth and Vine

Father, your address is Fifty-Sixth and so is mine

Mrs., more than eight blocks four times a day—

Father, here, at lunch time she can stay—

Mrs., we encourage no such program.

Father, she can take the bus to and from.

Mrs., for you Vine Street is truly close.

Father, Market is busy and dangerous to cross.

Mrs., Chestnut Street is our limit—

Father, that’s where we live! We’re on it!

Mrs., we stop at the south. You live on the north side—

Father, do you sit and say my child must ride

Or walk into a totally foreign postal zone?

Mrs., the wrong side of the street is your home.

Hyperbole or word for word,

The same score, whatever overheard:

A chilly man with a chilly vote.

Not even Mother’s master stroke

Could budge that unsmiling priest,

Wire-rimmed, with a sharp, sallow face.

In the universal church, I’m a homeless member.

Weeks before third-grade September,

We’re kicked out the South Philly projects!

Daddy’s ex-Army pay, a wink beyond limits.

But suburban splendor Mother spied,

Plopped me down and boldly lied

To another priest with a false address

Miles from the redlined parish.

Years puzzling to myself—How’d she do it? Pick

A complete stranger, a Negro Catholic

Down the street from church? Mother had her ways.

The woman’s name is lost—even her face,

More mist than flesh: a pleasant ginger-brown.

The twin boys—or girls—Was she their mom?

All day Mother stayed nearby—Nobody had a hunch?

And took me to a diner up the hill for lunch.

Even in the freezing winter? No. By then we returned

To Elmwood—Where everything burned?

No. To Anyemma’s—All school year? No. We got

Back to West Philly before it was hot—Not

Darby parish? No.—You lied three times third grade?

It was a secret, Mother said—Were you afraid?

*In the 1950s in West Philadelphia, Transfiguration of Our Lord, at 56^th and Cedar Avenue, served an established white congregation. Our Lady of Victory, at 54^th and Vine, was dominated by black parishioners, many of whom had converted to Catholicism because of the perceived superiority of parochial schools. Darby’s Blessed Virgin Mary served whites, many in a new suburban housing development.

Yvonne

First poetry editor of two pioneer feminist magazines, Aphra and Ms., Yvonne has received several awards including NEAs for poetry (1974, 1984) and a Leeway (2003) for fiction (as Yvonne ChismPeace). Print publications featuring her poems include: Bryant Literary Review, Pinyon, Nassau Review 2019, Bosque Press #8, Foreign Literary Journal #1, Quiet Diamonds 2018 (Orchard Street), 161 One-Minute Monologues from Literature (Smith and Kraus), This Sporting Life (Milkweed), Bless Me, Father: Stories of Catholic Childhood (Plume), Catholic Girls (Plume/Penguin), Tangled Vines (HBJ), Celebrations: A New Anthology of Black American Poetry (Follett), Pushcart Prize Anthology, and We Become New (Bantam). Excerpts from her verse memoir can be found online at American Journal of Poetry, AMP, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Poets Reading the News, Rigorous, Headway Quarterly, Collateral, the WAIF Project, Brain Mill Press’s Voices, Cahoodaloodaling, and Edify Fiction. More excerpts are forthcoming in Ragweed, Colere, Stonecrop, Beautiful Cadaver, Quiet Diamonds 2019 and Home: An Anthology (Flexible Press). She was an Atrocious Poets-One City, One Poet Contest finalist.

Cordelia M. Hanemann

October 2019 | poetry

Double Exposure

Meditation on Summer Day from Edvard Munch’s Linde Frieze

Munch, commissioned to paint

a sweet seascape—sunny

Asgardstrand—to please

the sensibilities of children:

rolling gentle horizons,

measured sweep of kindly sea,

gleaming white triangulations

of brilliant sails, and certainly, no

offensive human actors to clutter up

the scenery—“no lovers kissing…

children know nothing of such things.”

Did the offended artist know

he superimposed a scrim over holiday

and fancy, shattering serenity?

The accidental couple, spectral shapes

seeping through the gouache

of the artist’s eye,

transparent lover binding

his black-eyed bride

to the vertical mast of pine,

its flap of green sails futile

across the windless plane.

Invasive in one corner,

impasto oval blond,

ingenuous, eyeless witness

to predator and purple anguish.

Realities vacillate: beside

beach, sun, sea, and sails,

a cone of faceless girls,

black back of a blank man’s head,

intrusive clutch, or worse,

dark intimacies. The artless veneer

of image defies the eye: which

is surface, which substance?

Palimpsest or leakage?

Madonna

Meditation on Edvard Munch’s Madonna

Madonna of the red halo:

white moon shadows glaze her face,

eyes closed against dark;

lips, crimson as fruit,

sealed against desire;

arms fading into umber haze.

Eve to apple, hallowed fire:

eat of me: ripe woman body,

blood, breasts that suckle

a wolfish world, cryptic

smile barring sin.

Crucifixion:

apple white of ancient moonlight,

arms fastened to a tree,

dogwood, apple, rose, red gall,

pierced, openings

close on intimacy.

Mouths choke on repast,

lips on words:

It is consummated.

Fruit, forbidden in the garden,

ferments into wine, wine

into sacrifice.

Virgin waits: echoes

of the bridegroom

at the closed gate,

walls for the climbing rose;

candles flicker, moonlight

wanes to the hem of dawn.

Cordelia M. Hanemann

Cordelia Hanemann is currently a practicing writer and artist in Raleigh, NC. She has published in numerous journals including Turtle Island Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Dual Coast Magazine, and Laurel Review; anthologies, The Well-Versed Reader, Heron Clan VI and Kakalak 2018 and in her own chapbook, Through a Glass Darkly. Her poem, “photo-op” was a finalist in the Poems of Resistance competition at Sable Press and her poem “Cezanne’s Apples” was nominated for a Pushcart. Recently the featured poet for Negative Capability Press and The Alexandria Quarterly, she is now working on a first novel, about her roots in Cajun Louisiana.

The Delegates are Confused

October 2019 | poetry

I can tell because they spill out from the chain hotel

and stare at my empty storefronts.

Scattered scooters knocked over on sidewalks decorating

my urban decay.

—the convention and visitors bureau is even more confused—

Like an alcoholic, I exaggerate with grandiosity

and defiance, repeating myself about urban emptiness.

Old-timers no longer lecture the new residents. Even

the giddiest of community boosters have quit salvaging

the scooters and scooping up trash, now that the

convention and visitors bureau sells my neighborhood

to meeting planners who prefer their banquet rooms

cheap and their reward points easy.

—you don’t need a scooter to go from the hotel bar

to the board meeting upstairs—

After 30 years in this town, do I continue to tell its story

through my own story? Do I wait for the 12th revitalization?

—or as Cavafy warned—

If I move to another town, will the dead scooters ever rise

from the sidewalk?

Gary Singh

As a working scribe, Gary Singh has published over 1100 works including newspaper columns, travel essays, art and music criticism, profiles, business journalism, lifestyle articles, poetry and short fiction. He is the author of The San Jose Earthquakes: A Seismic Soccer Legacy (2015, The History Press) and was recently a Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing at San Jose State University.