Poetry

Oh Scissors

/ Salvatore Ala / 1 Comment

This is how I remember scissors:
Scissors in my father’s hand,
Cutting the Medusa’s head to survive.

Scissors in my grandmother’s hand
And drapery falling to the floor
Like shreds of the longest nights of war.

Scissors in my mother’s hand
And butcher’s string bleeding
Between her fingers.

Pairs multiply in my mind:
Nail and moustache scissors;
Thinners and shapers…

Also garden shears, pruners and loppers;
Scissors for grape stems and twine,
For snipping the threads of the stars, one by one.

My America

/ Salvatore Ala / 2 Comments

My America is all Detroit, Motown, dancing in the streets, my girl,
Tropical heat waves and what becomes of the broken-hearted after a riot.
My America is the ’67 riot and flames above the city,
My America is the arrival of The National Guard, revolution in the air,
CKLW news and the “murder-meter” rising.
My America is The Spirit of Detroit and the Joe Louis Fist.
My America is Rosa Parks and visits by Martin Luther King.
My America is where the South was born after the South had died.
My America is getting out of neighborhoods before dark.
My America is the auto industry and temporary-part-time wages.
My America is the war machine that beat back Nazis and fascists.
My America is the Vernor’s factory since 1866, Stroh’s Beer,
Jack Kevorkian and a suicide-assisted death at the end of an assembly line.
My America is rock concerts at Cobo Hall, jazz at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge,
Gang violence in the hypnotic haze of Thai stick and funk.
My America is all muscle cars and available parts.
My America is a union town with mob connections,
A road map that leads to Jimmy Hoffa, like a missing treasure.
My America is all Detroit, where my family lay in cemeteries around,
A border where half of me is standing and half in the ground.

Motor City Rap

/ Salvatore Ala / Leave a comment

Driving west down Jefferson East,
Already beyond the house of Edsel Ford,
The mansions of Grosse Pointe, Michigan–
Toward the antique wealth of Indian Village.
On this sultry Saturday night
Waves of mayflies jungle the streetlights
And drift like clouds among the trees.
Then Jefferson Avenue molts its affluence.
We enter the night of another city,
Burned out cars and abandoned buildings,
A black cop shaking down a black youth
In a liquor store parking lot. A crowd happens.
Heavy traffic stalls on mayfly wings.
Rap is blasting from every car.
When crack addicts look up to heaven
Stars seem scattered rocks of crack cocaine.
Upon the houses of Grosse Pointe
The mayflies amass, leaving their stain.

New Orleans or Nawlins or The City that Care Forgot or The City of Nature

/ Salvatore Ala / Leave a comment

Thus Hurricane Katrina blotted out every living thing
But the fountains of the deep closed
And the people remembered Nola.
They remembered their flowers of desire,
Live oaks branching across dreams,
The natural magic of walking banana trees,
Dancing lizards and voodoo honey.

People remembered and one by one
The sweet devilwood of their mornings
Returned in the beak of a dove.
There’s no way to stay sober
Where streets have the names of Muses.
There’s no way to stay dry
In so green and destructive an Eden.

State of Grace Hospital

/ Salvatore Ala / 1 Comment

Saw Grace Hospital operated on yesterday,
Walls and windows of a surgical procedure,
All lines and tubes, bent steal and remains,
Like a building you see in war documentaries,
Except this one bombed by fiscal management,
Recovery a financial risk, uselessness quarantined,
Without brain function, like municipal government.
And since the hospital has been sick
The neighborhood has open sores
Like someone amputated the streets
Giving nowhere to heal those with nowhere to go.
The hospital’s been sick so long
The sick have grown well and then sick again.
Those who died here exist in a state of grace.
Everyone born here is born again in other ruins.
Of all the beings we see expire in our lives
Nothing is like seeing a building stop breathing,
That’s a Code Blue to which no one responds
Except demolition crews and trucks, and they’re too late.

Symposia Above Sea Level

/ Salvatore Ala / 1 Comment

My cousins cautioned me about the red wine,
Counseled me on being too at ease
On ancestral land. Said lush vineyards grow
On Etna’s slopes, enriched by lava flows
And strange vapors steaming into the grapes
Produce a wine from the childhood of the world.

Whatever philosophy we were spewing
That I, drinking this, heard chaos talk,
Saw the sea burning in the crater of the sun,
Saw the mountain falling, space mounting;
Felt the wine venting, the winds of forgetting
Flying in the wine-dark sea of my mind–
I staggered on the cliff-side terrace—

Archimedes Theocritus Empedocles I slurred
The vertigo of history letting go,
Smelling sulfur, even there among clouds.

The Blue Hour

/ Salvatore Ala / 2 Comments

Neither complete reason or revelation
But falling in love again when we can’t help it
Ambient composite blue transparent to the stars
Between dawn and sunrise sunset and dusk
Constellations swirl in blue-ringed octopus spheres
Between cerulean and cobalt a painted sky
Something levels like the height of waters
Cityscapes hang in Krishna heavens
A mirror’s blue velvet tumbles to the floor
Night sways in the white sheers of a blue room
Unfinished wine drinks the rose of night
Music trickles the ether of afterglow
The blue hour ebbs from the earth’s shadow
We are strangers in the space of a window

Snail Recipe

/ Salvatore Ala / 1 Comment

As a boy I dreamt snails,
Dreamt my mother was mother of snails
Who nursed them with milk and honey,
Cooked pastina, sage and basil,
To cleanse and sweeten the flesh.
I dreamt snails and cringed.
At dinner, I slowly picked snails from their shells,
Savoring dark morsels, eating my dream.

Haunted Hearing

/ Salvatore Ala / 1 Comment

                        in memory of Henrietta Epstein

Abruptly Henrietta remembered it was January 7th…,
Synchronicity is a bridge over time,
Talking about John Berryman the day he died.
One minute life’s a dream, the next a song…
Henrietta was such a poetry lover
She plucked a candle from her Hanukkah menorah
To commemorate the Oklahoma-born poet.
She told of John wildly drunk in Michigan
Shouting frenzied needing her naked and now
At a party held by patrons in upscale Birmingham,
Even flinging the glass that was shrieking to marble,
Articulating an imperfect present,
Redemption is at war with time.
If eternity is freedom why suffer for life?
“The Mississippi will have its way.” John jumped in,
“More bourbon please, more Baudelaire.”
“I could use one myself,” said Henry.
“Mr. Bones got a powerful thirst.” Henry laughed.
We shivered to the otherworldly recitations,
Our tribute to a poet turned séance to his voices.