July 14, 2022

Glenn Morazzini

SONNY’S SONG

“Someday, they’re gonna write a blues
song just for fighters,” he once said.
“I’ll be for slow guitar, soft trumpet,
and a bell.”
—Sonny Liston, in
King of the World by David Remnick

As a kid I carried fields on my back,
sharecropper’s black cotton, when daddy
wasn’t hoeing welts on it with a strap.
Ran away, at 13, traced mama’s
roadless map of hope, to St. Louis,
an assembly line, shoe factory,
her heart, a piece of stitched leather.
slow guitar, soft trumpet, and a bell

On the streets I sold ice. I sold coal.
Slaughtered chickens under a blood-leaking
roof. But hunger is a hard habit to kick,
so I packed 200 pounds, 6 feet,
into fists and cashed their threats
in strangers’ faces for money’s meat.
By 22, same fists cuffed me
to the Missouri penitentiary, where,
gloved in the gym, Father Stevens
taught me to hurt others, legally.
slow guitar, soft trumpet, and a bell

17 straight wins, then Floyd Patterson
sucked canvas at my feet, but whose champion?
No mayor handed me the gold key,
or kid’s marching school band played
when I stepped off the plane in Philly.
I was still the gorilla in the ring,
a cage, white bars of stars and stripes
made in the U.S. of A.
slow guitar, soft trumpet, and a bell

Though Geraldine, her body a silk robe,
waited at home, and James Brown
screamed “Night Train” refrains
on the gym’s stereo, pumped me
to hit the speed bag, skip rope, spar miles—
something inside quiet, before Clay,
seventh round, Miami, jabbed me still.
Thought he was all mouth, but the man’s
hands backed up his flashy lip. Now,
I’d unslave his name, call him Ali.
soft guitar, slow trumpet, and a bell

The rest you know you don’t know:
did the mob, or a bad cop, tie
my arm to the white balloon of heroin
I finally rode out of Vegas-town,
or did I off myself, like an old felon.
You didn’t care if I lived,
why do you care how I died?
I’ll tell you when I see you in hell.
soft guitar, slow trumpet, and a bell

from Rattle #26, Winter 2006
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

__________

Glenn Morazzini: “I was doing research for a poem on the boxer Ali, plowing through Remick’s King of the World, when I was struck by Sonny Liston’s words and story, and in the end he came away with the song.”

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July 11, 2019

Glenn Morazzini

ARS POETICA HARMONICA

Call me aerophone. Call me free-reed.
I am the song’s honey-comb:
on nostalgia’s star-flied, toe-tapped, steamy-screened-
in porch, I bay to your blind uncle’s fretting banjo
as magnolias float bandshells of globed, ten-hole notes;

& your dead mother, on dream’s phone, pining
as you keep trying, what’s wrong?, what’s wrong?
I am waking’s hung-up-on dial tone, that flat-line
buzz in the blood, & your alarm clock’s whooping siren.

Call me diatonic. Call me chromatic.
I am the drunk angel’s mouth-harp,
palm-organ in your hand’s trembling steeple, each
channel searching the strayed way to your lost god,
tongue-shaped reeds choiring in the wind’s church;

& field-psalm for soldiers in gravel’s uniform,
my black notes, your flags luffing at taps’ half-mast.

Call me tremolo. Tongue-block, finger-sigh, over-bend
into glissando, & call me lickin’ stick, tin sandwich,
call me Mississippi sax: drawn, I wheeze an asthmatic’s
bluesroom gasp; blown, I am the green-throated hollers
in the broken beer bottles of your trashed adolescence,
fuck’s Ohhh baby that kicks holes in your bedroom’s sheetrock;

& sucked back: your cheek’s swollen wineskins, the bottled walls
of hookah’s water-smoke—I am release’s lung-punched bliss.
Cured in skin & soul I am, I am the breath in your bones.

Rattle #28, Winter 2007
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Glenn Morazzini: “The spirit that is the harmonica-persona of this poem, soaring down through nostalgia, dream’s anxious underworld, death, and back up and around through the blues, sex and excess, the spirit that has been cured in this skin and feels like the breath in my bones is as close to stating what I feel about and why I write poetry which is why I called it my Ars Poetica.”

 

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August 14, 2011

Glenn Morazzini

WHERE DO YOU GO?

Raising a shroud of dust in the dirt driveway,
relatives drove over soon as they heard:
Mary Ann, the one they nicknamed Maysie, thrown
from the back of a colliding motorcycle. Snapped
necklace of her nineteen-year-old bones.
But John, her father, wanted nothing of the praying
and cursing, air humid with tears, in that farmhouse.
He walked across the yard toward the woods, where
a June sunset blistered orange and red
as bittersweet in autumn. He said, to no one,
he’d stumbled upon enough winter-starved deer,
his share of chickens snuffed by heat, rat, fox.
Said nothing brings a body back. Cry all you like,
his face scrunched as a wrinkled handkerchief.

As I stood on the lawn, a twelve-year-old boy,
seeing my cousin on the motorcycle, clinging
to her boyfriend, brown hair blowing out of control,
I heard the farmhouse, where my parents stayed,
wailing like the siren of a nearing ambulance
going nowhere, and John, who slowly withdrew
into a curtain of white pines, repeating, I’d rather walk.
I did not want to enter either world.

from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
Tribute to Mental Health Workers

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