by Mike Love

The old neighborhood
lies in state.
That’s our house
on the corner,
plenty of room
in the attic for ghosts.
Plenty of space
out back for my mother
to drink and howl.
A wishbone dries
on the kitchen sill.
Us kids in the woods
building something
with dead limbs.
My father at the furnace,
burning
in the basement.

by Thomas R. Moore

Rockland Lady: A Love Rap
after “Untitled,” painted wood sculpture
                                    by Louise Nevelson

Stack curvy handles in the box.  Insert wooden
circles near the top.  Oh wonder woman,
press that deep black spray.
You’ve gotten to me, and I know it’s
true.  Oh Russian lady with flashing eyes and
head scarf flying, picking up shapes from
sidewalk trash, now you’re
hammering tap, tap, tap — so get out of her
way as she starts to spray!  Oh feminist lady I
love your crevices and your depths. I
dream of making you mine, and
your abstract doobity doo!  My angle
fits your wooden tray in a deep deep way.
What’s a sweetheart like you doing
here anyway with circles
and dowels and wooden crates?  I love
them all and the table leg.  Oh lumber yard lady
looking for a madcap wooden
grain.  I want more!  You
are black and gray and two by four.
I’m asking you, I’m pleading that you
tell me what I’ve got to do.
Each night on my knees I
pray that we’ll get together in shades
of gray.  Oh New York lady, don’t break my
heart.  When you stand alone
in museum lights, you show
sharp shadows that are dynamite.
Oh Rockland lady, I love your ebony art.

by Kathleen Sullivan

Fifty years ago I knocked on Mrs. C.’s door.
The elevator I rode to the 10^th floor
of the world’s largest housing project smelled like piss.
Only a chain link fence on the open edge
of the long balcony in front of her door promised sanctuary.

I was 22 and knew exactly nothing except I’d been sent to
ascertain Mrs. C’s psychic and interpersonal strengths.
To lift her out of poverty.  In grad school, we studied Poverty,
the Culture of.  The only other black person I’d met before
was the Fresh Air Kid who lived one summer in my parents’ basement.

Mrs. C and I met off and on.  I remember only: not knowing
what to do with my smile and my hands,
how dark it was inside.  In grad school, we didn’t study
Racism.  In April, MLK was shot, Chicago burned.
We never got to say goodbye.

In 1998, they tore Robert Taylor Homes down.
Urban policy wonks once envisioned those 28 brick
fortresses (not one tree for succor) as a model of modern architecture
for the poor.  It was the best dream
the collective minds of the 50’s could imagine.

I have a dream, he said.  I’ve seen the promised land.
1 may not get there with you.  I am not afraid
of any man.  The next day we shot him.  If I had a son
he would look like Travon Martin.  Or Freddie
Gray or Michael Brown or Amadou Diallo.

Teach me, Mrs. C, about a mother’s fear
for her sons’ lives, her grief over their imprisonment,
the indignity when her daughters are spat upon.
Teach me about fury and grace.
Teach me how you step off the curb for the white

woman to pass, smile, whisper to the child at your side
not to mind because those white women ar
ignorant, not yet wise enough to have seen
the Glory of the Coming of the Lord.
Teach me this, Mrs. C, before we say goodbye.

by Jeffrey Thomson

Galileo’s Middle Finger in the Museo Galileo, Florence
     “E pur si muove”

Under house arrest
in his villa golden
smoke of Florence
fencing him in
forced to read
seven penitential
psalms once a day
for three years
blessed are they
whose iniquities
are forgiven
he reads
he thinks
about tides
sloshing the seas
across the world
he thinks about comets
fleet globes of fire
how they move
he thinks about circles
that forever return
about his father
a lutenist long dead
who said that on a stretched
string the pitch varies
as the square root
of the tension
the pressure of his life taut
he is that string
he is certain
he knows
Bruno was hung
upside down naked
wreathed in smoke
in fire in the Campo de Fiori
he knows he has
escaped that fate
stopped moving
he will live his life
in this villa until his eyes
fail and his sleep
he keeps reading
his middle finger
tracing the path
of the words
the evening
spins around him
across a sky
frozen with stars