Gerry LaFemina

Roadster
 
The RPM's whine rises an octave, thus I depress the clutch, slide the car into fourth without much fuss, just throaty rumble.  At 60 it can be difficult to smell anything but burning petrol, but all of today's apple pollen fills the cockpit, some resting in my hair. Dusking sky reveals the first star to the south east, and cool air rubs back of my right hand almost seductively. Home is both ahead and behind me, just numbers on a street, really just a concept. Like responsibility. Like freedom. Like love. The passenger seat remains empty. The radio's lit up but mute, static hidden in silence. There's no song but engine roar, at least not tonight, not anymore. 

**
 
In Search of Quasimodo
 
Maybe we all walk around, the heart a silent bell in the steeple of our chests, and we’re just waiting—really waiting—for someone to pull the long, strong rope to set us tolling. These days most new churches program their bell songs, we can hear them blasting over our small town every hour, as if god is in the machine. Imagine the minister swiping left for the hymns to choose.
 
And who hasn’t felt like an abandoned church out in the sticks, dilapidated and derelict, the deacons and congregants dead or moved on. White paint peeling like strips of an old poster in the wind.
 
The loneliest among us pray just to be touched, to be heard, and, yes, I’ve lived among them in my cloister, those lean years, meditating, libidinous yet alone. Or worse, those night club Saturday nights, all of us forlorn, so many beautifully monstrous individuals, the heavy ropes from their bell towers just out of reach. We weathered those nights, those long, lonely rides home. How horrible, at breakfast to hear the Sabbath bells calling.

**
 
Creeps
 
Creeps are everywhere, my mother warned.  You know them: the neighbor scowling at every kid on a bicycle (a bat with a glove angling over a shoulder), the three-card-monte dealer & his partner who whispers doubt into your left ear, breath reeking of sexuality. Even in the mirror–I’ve been the model son, boyfriend, husband: lured you in only to bust your heart, so now I can’t stand to look at my reflection.  I’ve told lies, too, & there went another one.  The creeps creep us out, as the kids used to say, like the guy in the last car of the subway smelling like stale piss & something funkier, more primal, perilous.  Sure, there are benign creeps–the over-indulgent, the false lavishers of praise, the seductive smilers (how often did I practice that gesture). I’ve prayed to survive & preyed to survive, & what has it gotten me?  I see how you shy away now, but let’s face it, even my remorse might be a ruse. Barnum (that creep) knew a rube was born every minute, & a creep, too, Darwin might insist because isn’t that survival of the fittest?  Don’t think about it too deeply, it might just give you the creeps, might just get you to forgive me.
 
**

 Achtung Katzen!!!    
 — sign outside a house in Eschen Liechtenstein
 
The notice, no doubt, meant to caution drivers about pets on the loose. Or maybe to beg birds to be vigilant, for it’s easy to believe in this Alpine town that birds can read. We’re in serious Brothers Grimm territory, and we all know how smart crows can be. The cats in the sign are cute, cartoonish. In the windows they’re ominous, scheming, purring for pets one minute, then tonguing their chops when a collared dove or plover lands on the lawn. The warblers warble out warnings. Swifts fly by swiftly. The sign reminds us the cats know how to get outside. Maybe, they’ve killed before. Wouldn’t that explain the carrion raven who roosts nearby, talking to itself, waiting.

**
 
Groceries
 
I saw a man in the market today wearing a cape and I didn’t imagine he was Batman or some magician on his way to an audition. This was no cosplayer in costume. No, I thought James Brown. That’s right the Godfather of Soul, though this man just pushed his cart among the produce, such a sorry occupation for a man in a cape. The cape should make every floor a stage. The cape says, Amen when we say, Sock it to me. The cape says, I feel good even among the headache meds and muscles balms. The cape said to Bootsy Collins, wear me when you meet George Clinton. I know what’s good for you.You got Elvis in a jumpsuit in the juice aisle. Buddy Holly glasses by the ice cream. The cape says nothing to these two. He’s no super hero, but the man in the cape is the hardest working shopper in the supermarket. He loads groceries on the conveyor, pays his bill, loads it all in a sack. To the cashier, the cape says, Papa’s got a brand new bag.

**
 
A Pearl is the Autobiography of an Oyster
 
As with so many stories, this one starts with a singular hurt—some slight or harsh words, a profound irritant that can never be spat out. Instead it remains, a sharp sand grain held against the tongue for decades. Imagine how it sits and shifts, scratchy, cutting. Imagine how it scrapes and how, too, over time it loses its edge, gets smoothed over even as it grows and calcifies. A hurt like that defies logic. It gains luster there on the sea floor, hidden and sealed shut, waiting for the young woman who can hold her breath the longest, the one who dives down to pick from the beds, plucking mollusks ‘til she gathers a whole mesh sack of them. And later, shucking them open, that smooth and simple iridescence must astound her. Picture her rolling that small orb gently between her fingers, wide-eyed by the opalescent beauty of endurance.

**
 
In the Distance
 
Smoke stack smoke roving behind the shroud of trees; the scenic railroad with its four old-fashioned carriages moving into October. At this distance it seems so diminutive, no bigger than the models I played with as a child, those HO scale boxcars and tankers. How like God I felt after a derailment, when I’d lift the locomotive back to the tracks, set it all in line. I’d pick up the plastic people, realign the cars, return the tiny trees to their places. I had built this world after all and wanted to set it right most days, wanted to be heroic, beloved. Yes, how like God I felt. And then those days of frustration and despair came, days of hormone and heartache, days when I’d knock past the puny traffic, lift the train from its rails, and roar. How like Godzilla. 
 
**
 
In the Black Square
– Vasily Kandinsky
 
I’ve been in Columbus Circle and Times Square both on the same day, well past midnight, and still been unsurprised—the taxis, the digital billboards with all those pixels, the lonely guy walking on the other side of Broadway. I was, of course, on the other side of from him, also alone, southbound. No one remembered me in Herald Square. At Union Square the city police warned against loitering. In Washington Square they fined me for littering, throwing as I was the confetti of her last love letters to the wind. Find fault with that. I believed in so much then. Someone had planted a flag on the moon, after all, and although it went unheralded, the subways moved thousands underground every day. The night sky like a hematoma. In the black square where I lived, too many sharp edges! Too many lines I could stumble over. Careful careful, I mumbled to myself. The Circle Line circled tourists around Manhattan. I circled the squares of the calendar, never figuring out what went awry. Yes, there were any number of bridges off that Island, but in that light they seemed both crooked and askew.

**
 
Found Diary of an Unknown Adolescent
 
So many entries are entertaining entreaties to a wannabe lover, a classmate he wanted to mate with apparently. Long treatises on longing: how long the evenings were, how much longer the weekends without her. Did they ever even date? Her name like a treat, written over and over for weeks, but never tasted. The dated pages of this edition don’t say, but how he treasured (his word) her comic treatment of their math teacher in the cafeteria. The rest is mundane—the names of bands and friends, a refrain of complaints and petty slights. It’s a life I remember, a life I can’t recant, even though it’s not mine, except in the slightest ways, that handwriting, for instance, that stupid sentimentality, the way he kept sentry over his secret desire deep into the suburban night. 
 
**

Gerry LaFemina is the author of numerous collections of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. His most recent collection of prose poems is Baby Steps for Doomsday Pressing and the anthology, Fantastic Imaginary Creatures, both from Madville. A noted editor, educator, and arts activist, he teaches at Frostburg State University and in the MFA program at Carlow University, and serves as President of the Board of Savage Mountain Punk Arts. In his spare time, LaFemina is also the singer and principal songwriter for Punkerton recording artists, The Downstrokes.