My Father Drinks Champagne Over Jam


New Year’s Eve, 1963, lips pressed 
against some lady’s slipper, my father 
gargles cheap sparkling wine.  “For 
auld lang syne” he sings, bellowing 
his harmonies over crowd noise, 
“for auld lang syne, my jo…” 
His voice thunders its rusty baritone 
halfway between squalling cat and 
barbershop quartet, his gray-green 
eyes alive with something that is not 
quite mirth, salacious and bawdy 
and wild. He’s pulled his glasses off, 
and now his face looks strange, folded 
into itself, crumpled, as if someone had 
tossed it at the wastebasket and missed. 

Beyond the bay window, darkness rolls 
out to the street, car horns blare 
in midnight’s stream.  
When the hostess poured sweet 
bubbly over sliced, bleeding pears 
and apples, purple grapes, he cried 
out like a man in pain “My God, 
she’s pouring champagne over jam!” 
Guests roared, the hostess cooed 
“ah, my gray elephant” and nuzzled 
his white hair.  Now his stained tongue 
darts from his mouth, syrupy wine 
spilling from her shoe all down his soiled 
white shirt.  The year opens, a rip 
in the fabric of my jeans, days spilling 
into weeks, a dizzy calendar swirling 
in air, ashes frozen above flickering flame.    

(First published in Stirring)



A Hundred and Eighth Street


It must have been the Russian star that fell last night
into some lost planet of ghosts and mail.  Nothing else

stirred and it has been so long since we heard from you.  
Yes I’m hungry and yes, I have driven around looking 

at the old school with its weird cupola still intact
and its awkward diamond with the short right field 

fence and tennis courts scratched into concrete with no nets. 
On a hundred and eighth-street, all the bakeries are gone, 

candy stores and delis, frankfurters on windmills, 
winding through grilling heat.  The pickles are gone, 

with their soft, sour skins and The Pizza Den with its square 
slices for fifteen cents and nickel bags of pot at the back 

booth near the kitchen and the girls with their teased hair 
chewing Juicy Fruit and dancing to the juke box as if 

they could ride the doo-wop right on through the viscous
ocean of their anxious parents’ dull and desperate lives.

(First published in Gutter Eloquence)



My Father Leads a Dance of Goats

​
You might think this happened in some village back
in the old country, the kind 

Chagall painted with strange colors of memory –
green faced men in blue caps, 

translucent sheep’s head, winged angels dancing at
a wedding feast – but no, he led 

these goats down Queens Boulevard, a wild parade
of horns and tails following his 

jaunty steps as cars slowed and gaping brought the
traffic almost to a halt. A blue 

conference of cops as goats milled and chewed the
sparse curbside grass, but 

somehow he had a permit and on they went, billies
and nannies and kids, goat stench 

mingling with gas fumes and roasting meat, 
past the Knish-Nosh they strutted, past 

Lefrak City under dark train trestles, west, 
always west past Greek diners and 

electronics stores, past pizza joints and 
Chinese takeouts, movies, gas stations 

with their perpetual tire sales, the sky 
wide and open above crawling cars and 

crowds, shaken with disbelief, cold and electric blue
​above his priestly bacchanal.  ​