June 2017
John Allman
vikkat2@aol.com
As a boy and young man I went to the movies at least twice a week.  The local movie palace was the Loew's Triboro.  Years into my poetry work, I wrote a collection of poems devoted to the movies and the lives of the people in the Queens NY neighborhood where I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s—prime film noir territory.

The Script


Another time banging on the door like the ice man, years
dripping from his shoulders. 
What should I say in my fedora, what should my sister do,
rising from her couch all doped up?  Mother nervously sipping
tea, in this movie we're suddenly

written into, the door shuddering to his blows, my father
locked out again.            
One morning I slouch into the street, sneering at myself
in the grocery window, smoking Raleighs, stealing The Mirror
from a newsstand, to see what

war is on.  What's at the RKO.  Dreaming, my sister pushes some
old guy out the window
of his office, because he can’t keep his hands to himself.  He's the
therapist she sleeps with, see, the one who tells her how sick she
really is.  The next night,

after a few drinks, a lot of disgust, she dreams she jumps out the
window.  There's hell to pay
because our mother is afraid to wake her when she's screaming.
How many people can you look after? Me, I’m just the moody detective
looking at my sister's photo. 
 
(Originally published in Loew’s Triboro)

 

Dropout
 

Mrs. Fox the Trig teacher said no one had ever cut her classes
the way he did.  He pulled a 16 on the Regents. 
The truant officer, his index and ring fingers stumpy from the war
or maybe from the radiator fan of an old Chevy, kept prodding
him in the chest as if he’d fallen asleep at his post. 

They called his father at work, and his father caught him in the street,
said he’d take a bat to him. They put him in a special
class of bright kids and told them never to speak to him.  So he stole homework. 
Stole hubcaps.   Shoplifted in Strauss Auto Parts.  Sold everything to the
gas station where he worked week-ends.  Drank

Seagram's 7 in the Loew’s balcony, watching gun fighters twitch a smile.                 
Stuck a pin through the telephone
wire in the phone booth to make short-circuit calls to his girl friend,
who kept telling him he could finish school.  Whose mother wanted her
to hang up.  At night sometimes

the planes from LaGuardia flew so low it was like thunder in the alleyway,
like bombardment, the whizz of mortar shells, sky
collapsing on his uncovered head where he slept on a ragged couch. 
The iceman in the morning clinking outside like a corporal collecting
dog tags from the dead.             
 
(Originally published in Loew’s Triboro)
​©2017 John Allman
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