July 23, 2015

Coco de Casscza

AT JURY DUTY

At jury duty
        Calvin Trillin 
                told me eating 
                        at Chanoodle 
                                would change 
                                       the way I think 
                                                about fried rice 

                                                                  I tried it

                                                But still I think 
                                        about fried rice 
                                the way I did 
                        before except 
                it always makes 
        me think of 
Calvin Trillin

from Rattle #48, Summer 2015
Tribute to New Yorkers

[download audio]

__________

Coco de Casscza: “My aunt, landing first time at JFK, took the subway in then out again, not pausing to not be appalled at all she saw and heard and smelled that made me stay.” (web)

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July 22, 2015

Bill Christophersen

NEIGHBOR

Thanksgiving Day, 1983.

Tom, Debra and I are sitting down to the
meal she’s cooked when, she, a Lutheran
minister, remembers Mr. Breuer next door
in 2A. He lost his wife two weeks ago
to cancer; it seems the neighborly thing
to ask him in to share the meal. Grief
has tenderized his face. He doesn’t talk,
pushes a fork through the sweet potato squash.
The bruise on his arm resolves, on second glance,
into numbers. Yes, he says, he’d been interned.
Buchenwald. He’d survived. But what, he asks,
is this “survive”? Is survive that your body
is here, gets up, goes to window, goes to toilet,
makes tea, makes toast? “Shovel this latrine,
Jew,” the German soldier says. “So give
me shovel,” I says. “There is no shovel,
Jew,” he says. “Use your hands.” And so, is
true, Femmie and me survive, he says, crying.

from Rattle #48, Summer 2015
Tribute to New Yorkers

__________

Bill Christophersen: “My native Bronx burned down in the ’70s, beginning about the time I moved to Manhattan (1971). Every summer night in 1976, 1977, the fire engine sirens would begin about sundown—I’d hear them and see the smoke across the Harlem River. Before the decade was out, much of the borough I and my classmates had grown up in looked like post-World War II Dresden. Packs of wild dogs roamed the streets of Hunts Point. Morrisania and Mott Haven were, except for the housing projects, mostly rubble lots and the shells of charred tenements. This history has little to do with my poem ‘Neighbor’ but much to do with who I am and what I write.”

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July 21, 2015

Susana H. Case

HOLD ME LIKE YOU’LL NEVER LET ME GO

In the street, I find an acoustic guitar,
no name on it, so I decide it’s mine and
learn some chords from
a pretty boy ten years younger
whom I retrieve from a SoHo party.

He plays in a garage band. He likes
my long, ironed-straight hair, how I
remove my clothes, their erratic cuts,
easy to toss onto a chair. For a week
we don’t leave the apartment.

He makes no plans to go home, but home
is Sweden, so that’s understandable.
I strum and roam through rooms,
feeling like a folk goddess.
I’m leavin’ on a jet plane, I sing.

You ever spend a whole week naked, talking
about nothing but folk rock? But then 
we run out of food and being with him begins
to seem like shoplifting. You ever do that,
take what you want just to see how it feels?

from Rattle #48, Summer 2015
Tribute to New Yorkers

__________

Susana H. Case: “I am one of the few people I know in NYC who was born here and when I consider all the possibilities, how lucky was that? I found an academic job and stayed. My most recent book is 4 Rms w Vu, and yes, New Yorkers are obsessed with their apartments (sometimes houses): finding them, keeping them, coping with their neighbors, landlords, etc. It’s hard to know how I’d be writing if I hadn’t grown up here and remained, or even if I’d be writing, but without sidewalks as my encyclopedia, my words would probably have less of an edge. I’d probably sound nicer. I might even be nicer, but I don’t really believe that. I know I wouldn’t have written ‘Hold Me Like You’ll Never Let Me Go.’”

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July 20, 2015

Ryan Black

FRAGMENTS OF A SHOOTING SCRIPT

v.

sheets of the past can still be evoked and summoned, writes Deleuze. But the images that are drawn from these are now quite useless because they can no longer be inserted into a present which would extend them into action.

CUT TO:

66 EXT. WOODHAVEN – DAY

It’s mid-July, South Queens. A crowd gathers
on the east side of 78th Street, a film crew
works on the west. You stand on the corner
across from Neir’s Tavern, with FRANKIE
and JO, trying to spot MARTIN SCORSESE.

The heat’s an irritant, thick as a police officer.
To cool off you think of winter, of Christmas
Eve at Neir’s, your father’s red-faced smiles,
your mother’s booming voice. You think
of the cartoon reels and bowling lane,
the plastic mesh stockings stuffed
with JOLLY RANCHERS, sheets of sugar,
a HERSHEY BAR.
   And what you are watching
is artifice, or the staging of artifice. 
What you are watching is ROBERT DE NIRO
and RAY LIOTTA in custom suits,
walking down the block, again and again.

What you are watching is DE NIRO and LIOTTA,
preceded by GAFFERS unfurling CABLE,
a KEY GRIP carrying KLIEG LIGHTS,
WHITE SCREENS, a BOOM POLE
with a DEAD CAT, two GRIPS backpedaling,
pulling a DOLLY, and LARRY MCCONKEY
strapped to a STEDICAM.

A TECHNICIAN waves to someone
OFF CAMERA. No, he’s swatting at a fly.

Bored, you walk to Sal’s for a slice
and some garlic knots, but the CAMERA
stays behind. FRANKIE walks home, wakes
his father from a nap, and the CAMERA
doesn’t record this. So what then is the subject?
JO peering through the crowd, SCORSESE
blocked by a TRANSISTOR. Can the image
be its own making?
   In fourteen months,
you’ll sit in the Crossbay Theater,
with your oldest brother and three of his friends,
a weekend matinee, the theater full,
and the illusion of narrative, of shadow and light,
summer for winter, Queens for Brooklyn,
will seem as real to you as the murder
DE NIRO plots in six seconds of screen time,
walking 78th Street.

CUT TO:

67 OMIT

from Rattle #48, Summer 2015
Tribute to New Yorkers

__________

Ryan Black: “I grew up in Woodhaven, South Queens. The J train cuts through the neighborhood like a watercourse, Manhattan bound, and bends into Brooklyn beside Cypress Pool and a churchyard for the Union dead. And most of my work concerns Queens—its history, both public and personal, real and imagined—and what Joan Didion dismisses as ‘the wastes of Queens’—but the work isn’t corrective. I don’t debunk a mythology or challenge misapprehensions, but try to complicate inherited representations of the borough.”

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