Pittsburgh; Found by Mara Cregan

Pittsburgh; Found Madison Custer

Pittsburgh; Found Table of Contents Author’s Note

“Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City” by Stefan Lorant: Leveling Off

Pittsburgh; Then

Pittsburgh; Now

Pittsburgh; Inside

“Astronomy Handbook” by James Muirden

Cosmic “death star” is destroying a planet, Astronomy Magazine, October 22, 2015 13 Cosmic “death star” is destroying a planet, Astronomy Magazine, October 22, 2015 14 Cosmic “death star” is destroying a planet, Astronomy Magazine, October 22, 2015 15 “Landmark Architecture: Pittsburgh and Allegheny County” by Walter C. Kidney: The Terrain 16 18

The Shell Speaks

“Memoirs of a Life Chiefly Passed in Pennsylvania Within The Last Sixty Years” by Alexander Graydon 20 KITES

KENNYWOOD

Knot

Kids

Author’s Note

This chapbook is about Pittsburgh. It’s also about growing up, identity, and learning. Each section is headed with a found poem from various sources found in Pittsburgh, whether it was in the Genealogy room in the Carnegie Library, or in the libraries at CAPA. The rest of the poems are all different, but all written to the theme of the city. These poems represent my culminating project of my time at CAPA. After all, what would I be without Pittsburgh? “This is editing at its extreme: writing without composing. Half the poems seek to serve poetry’s oldest and most sincere aims with one of its newest and most ironic methods, to dig deep with a shallow tool. The other half are just jokes.” – Annie Dillard

“Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City” by Stefan Lorant LEVELING OFF The visitor returning to Pittsburgh after an absence of a decade asked the obvious question: What has happened while he was away? “Nothing,” came the answer. “Nothing at all.” Pittsburghers who had been used in the postwar years to instant transformation feel let down if an area is no longer demolished overnight and if no new skyscrapers strut up on land formerly blighted by slums. Things were happening every day—every minute. The air was cleared, the black grime of generations was scoured away, the rivers were harnessed— There was a will, there was excitement to build a new city— a city their grandfathers never dreamed possible. “If we could clear the smoke from the air, if we could make the sun visible, we can do anything” was the spirit. And they did. They shared a vision for their city— a vision they determined to make reality.

Pittsburgh; Then

Upon entrance to the city, the traveler was hit with smoke, the sound and taste of steel inside her body, the hard stare of Pittsburgh bridging the gap between the gloomy gray East and the West. Gray was the patron color of the East, each city filled with dust and smog. Bridges across the three rivers reminded them of smoke clouds from mouths traveling through the air, hard as the steel the city was famous for. Steel and coal and natural gas gave the gray Pittsburgh it’s signature color. Hardly seeming like a welcoming city, covered in a thick layer of smoke and smog. Bridges surfaced from the cloud. The first bridge opened at Smithfield and St. Clair, made of wood instead of steel but still colored like smoke, the sooty gray exterior mirroring that of the city. It isn’t hard to find a bridge to take you somewhere. What’s hard is to find a bridge to take you where you want to go. The city is so vast, certain areas will steal your heart, remove the gray shield from residual smoke and reveal fleshy pink that smoke can’t touch. One can hardly find a gray building or bridge that doesn’t make them feel something. Steel hearts become watery, the city of old smoke and bridges

turns hard icy rivers into streams that steal your heart away. The city isn’t only gray anymore.

Pittsburgh; Now

The air in Pittsburgh is sharp. The weather has become more clear, the mass of steel bones glinting in the sun. The city is clean. Buildings don’t usually look soft, but after rain, they seem more inviting. Soft is a good word to describe Pittsburgh. It usually seems so sharp but every once in a while the buildings don’t looks so gray and overbearing. Clear windows show the innards of the city, thousands of brains surrounded in solid steel skeletons. Frames built of steel never seemed so soft. The people of the city are witty, clever, sharp-‐ crystal clear. They create and design, building gardens and libraries. Buildings house more than people. They’re home to steel hearts, immovable and solid, clear in intention but soft in nature. The clouds are a sharp contrast against the sky, the city a gray-‐and-‐green chunk above the rivers. The city looks like one building, all layered around with sharp corners and steel edges, soft grass and clear glass windows. The people are clear-‐ no one lives in a gray city unless they are having a love affair with the buildings. Pittsburgh is a soft lover with a heart of steel, and its affection, just as sharp. There is nothing as sharp as a clean steel building.

There is nothing as soft as a clean clear city.

Pittsburgh; Inside

People say that there is a way to know someone only by touching, that their skin will prickle up and you’ll be able to see just how fragile they are. You can hear the hairs on their arms stand up on end, your mouth will get a funny taste; metallic. The room will start to feel different. It will smell like honey and cinnamon and cough drops, and you’ll know. There isn’t a lot that I know about the way things work. I know the texture of soft finger tips on table top, that you can get a whiff of bread or cut grass just by standing at the window, looking out at the world. The flavor of loving is something confusing, the sound of courage is something only you can hear. The only way to find out, to really know how someone is, is to ask yourself. Taste the tang of confidence. Feel the texture of hope. The sight of you is all I want to see. All I want to smell is the swirling of my perfume and your cologne, the scent that our home has adopted. If you listen, you can hear the baby calling upstairs. All she can see is the dark of the room, the mobile in front of her face, she doesn’t know that I’ll be up in a minute. I feel like the baby. The piquancy of not knowing what lies ahead tastes like what your tongue feels like after burning it on tea, smells like the ground after rain, but I haven’t felt a single drop. Somewhere I stopped listening. Something happened along the way that I just don’t know. There is nothing to see here, nothing to see. I don’t know what love feels like, only what it looks like. No one taught me how to tell if a melon has gone ripe just by the taste, There isn’t a lot that I know about the way things work. You smell like the woods. Nothing can be said for the way you sound when we finally touch. I never learned how to know if something looks

just as good as it feels, or how to know a taste only by the smell. I’m tired of all the noise.

“Astronomy Handbook” by James Muirden

THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSE The Big Bang. Galaxies flying apart, tracks run backwards, a mass of atomic particles at a temperature of millions of millions of degrees. The chaos of particles must have started arranging itself in to the elements we see today. THE AMATEUR ASTRONOMER amateur astronomers start out as stargazers familiar with the stars Some amateurs become bodies that make our solar system Sun, Moon, planets, comets others prefer to look further examining the clusters and gaseous Galaxy. They even search galaxies, distant light million of years on its journey. AMATEUR DISCOVERIES Important discoveries made by amateurs, even in these days of giant telescopes, are made relatively near at hand; Christmas evening discovered a new comet, a remote galaxy of stars, a supernova, an exploding star. Such an event is rare. THE MOVING SKY we observe the sky on the spinning earth, everything in the universe moves around it. We seem to be at the centre of a huge rotating invisible sphere. The heavenly bodies seem to be attached to the camera, celestial shutter left open-‐ while the Earth spins, the stars form trails.

THE MOON Of all the objects in the sky, the Moon is the one that appears to undergo the most dramatic change of movement and light. inert, airless and dead; the last dramatic 3000 million years still recorded, apparently fresh, on its crater poked face. The Moon passes through phases, shines, only reflecting sunlight. The Moon, like the Earth, is always half-‐lit by the Sun. Night by night, different features of its surface Illuminated-‐ detail is not surprising. FINDING A STAR Star maps can at first be very confusing. A good way of avoiding disappointment is to look for some of the brighter stars. Once you are familiar with these, the other patterns will be easier to find. The constellations are so well known that they can be used to identify the sky. THE STARS When the stars shine out on a clear night, the sight is both confusing and awe-‐inspiring. Any attempt to organize them into constellations appears hopeless.

Cosmic “death star” is destroying a planet Astronomy Magazine, October 22, 2015

“This is something no human has seen before. We’re watching a solar system get destroyed. ”— Andrew Vanderburg, Harvard-‐Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I am a cosmic death star and I am going to destroy a planet. I am going to climb the electrical pole and cut the wires and suck on the ends to fill myself and I will put out the neighborhood and I’ll electrify you. I am going to quake the earth until all the leaves fall off the trees and blow them all into a pile and jump in it. I will take your planet and turn it upside down and I will turn your chrysanthemums into paper and your cities into gold. I’ll shake things up. I’ll treat you like a snow globe. I’ll knock your socks off. I’ll ask you how you are and I’ll laugh when you tell a joke and cry when you want me to. I’ll let you take the blame when you insist and I’ll let you treat me like the cosmic goddess we both know I am. I’ll let you observe the stars inside me and I’ll let you watch my eyes twinkle and I’ll let you tell me I’m Neptune. I’ll let you call me a queen.

Cosmic “death star” is destroying a planet Astronomy Magazine, October 22, 2015

“It’s like panning for gold—the heavy stuff sinks to the bottom.” — John Johnson, Harvard-‐ Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge Massachusetts.

I am a cosmic queen. Chop me down, slice me open, you’ll find a solid gold core. I am a diamond, I am heavy. I am unbreakable. I can cut your edges. I can make you shine like no one’s ever seen, like the brightest star in the sky. I’ll let you glow brighter than me. I’ll build you up and let your tear yourself down and watch your birthday newspaper fall to the floor in pieces, and then I’ll gather them all up and put them in a plastic bag and write your name on it in sharpie and drop it off on your front porch and hope it doesn’t blow away before you find it. I’ll pull things together. I’ll watch you grow and be there when you get so tall your head brushes the leaves on the trees, when the apples hit your forehead and leave small dents. I’ll let you call me your golden girl.

Cosmic “death star” is destroying a planet Astronomy Magazine, October 22, 2015

“We now have a ‘smoking gun’ linking white dwarf pollution to the destruction of rocky planets.”— Andrew Vanderburg, Harvard-‐Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge Massachusetts.

Your golden girl left a while ago. She packed up and shipped out, left her gun smoking on the table. She sucked the electricity out of the town and flipped things upside down. Electrifying. She was solid gold. She was a bridge across rivers, a glass of cold water, a firing synapse between your neurons-‐ she made you move. She made you dance like you were a floating ember with nothing to lose, quaking the earth until all the leaves tumble to the ground. She didn’t lose interest. She was a cosmic death star and she destroyed your planet.

“Landmark Architecture: Pittsburgh and Allegheny County” by Walter C. Kidney THE TERRAIN We in Allegheny County live in a terrain of hills and ravines, with occasional plateaus and river plains and much rolling country; a place that has been difficult to build on and frustrating to travel, yet one with remarkable natural beauty and grandeur. For nearly two-‐and-‐a-‐half centuries, man has scraped and scratched at this primitive terrain, bridging its voids, tunneling its hills, filling in its shallower depressions. Despite this activity, the nature of the terrain is unchanged. Many hilltop views are dramatic for their vistas along ancient river valleys, up among the hills over a landscape that is still basically a major presence. The county, and Pittsburgh especially, has been called a museum of bridges. Some of our bridges were grotesque by any aesthetic standard, but the handsome legacy of bridges of progressive design, clean in their lines, with modern architectural touches are good for a few years more. Less frequent than the bridges, less conspicuous in the landscape, but striking nonetheless are the great Victorian retaining walls that appear here and there where a street or railroad has been cut from a hillside. Made of massive, rugged-‐textured, roughly squared stones, the stonecutters on piecework might have their personal symbols scratched on the surface. Tunnels have been less conspicuous, and the portals visible from downtown have been masked with modern boxy structures that reveal nothing of their essential nature.

Half-‐cable car, half-‐elevator, the inclines hoist passengers up various of our steep slopes on frail looking structures of girders and bents. The alternatives to incline travel were long heaven-‐storming roads or flights of public steps, hundreds of them sometimes, of rotting wood or flaking concrete that simply went straight up with the occasional small mercy of a landing that joggled from side to side to make contact with scattered houses.

The Shell Speaks

SOLIDARITY-‐ S2.11 HAMMERHEAD 2X The river sounds remarkably different from water level. Suddenly, somehow, it’s louder. The water rushes under the boat, bubbling along to the one catch, one finish together, in and out together. If you’re out late enough, you get the river all to yourself. Gentle wind eliminates waves, and the only disturbances are the puddles made by the oars and the small wake left behind when the boat cuts through the water. The city is bright and lit up, hardly recognizable from underneath, but you’re still all alone. JUBILANT-‐ S2.31 HAMMERHEAD 2-‐/X The blue quad oars are too long for this rigging, and coach reminds you to grab some clams next time and you don’t really know where the clams are, or what they do exactly, but you take the boat out anyway and you float along the river as you try to fix your feet and as the girl in front of you rows along and remarks about how clutch the oarlocks are and you agree, they are pretty clutch with that checkerboard pattern on them, like wow, Hudson knows how to make a clutch boat, and you agree out loud but you don’t really know what clutch means but you say it anyway and you start rowing and you’re afraid of flipping but you end up OK and you glide out farther than you were anticipating with every stroke and you move a lot farther a lot quicker with a lot fewer strokes and your puddles are dark,

and you couldn’t be more pleased. HERE’S THE THING-‐ PIENERT X25 Think lightweight thoughts, coach says. Inhale on the recovery, exhale on the drive, inhale hard, the air makes you float, makes you buoyant, just don’t flip. TAKE TO THE SKY – VESPOLI D HULL 8+ M2 I want to say there’s nothing like the feeling of eight people moving and working together and the speed that comes out when there’s one swing out of the bow together, but I’d be lying. There’s a lot that feels that good. When the water is like glass and you can see the reflection of your sweaty face and the sweaty girls behind you. When it’s hot out and someone splashes you. When you crab and recover so quickly almost no one notices. When the little voice inside your head stops screaming “I can’t,” and starts whispering “I can.”

“Memoirs of a Life Chiefly Passed in Pennsylvania Within The Last Sixty Years” by Alexander Graydon If it be admitted that the human heart may be bettered by instruction, mine, I may aver was benefitted by this work of the virtuous mild wisdom of my veneration. The youthful hero excited my sympathy and emulation. I took part, like a second friend, in the vicissitudes of his fortune, -‐-‐ I participated in his toils, -‐-‐ I warmed with his exploits, -‐-‐ I wept where he wept, and exulted where he triumphed. It may equally tend to throw some light on the little world upon those whose stage I had now entered. Though possessing a sufficient degree of spirit to defend myself when assaulted I had never been of light and slender make, I was not calculated for the business.

KITES

I. The first time I ever flew a kite I was with my grandpa. We drove to the field by the elementary school and though my mom persisted that it wasn’t windy enough, my grandpa insisted that we try. We tried for an hour. Nothing happened. Then suddenly, with a breath of fresh air, the kite was thrust into the sky, soaring high above my little head. My mom had already driven home. She acted like she didn’t believe me when I told her later. II. The Point was windy. We spread out our lunch on a picnic blanket and ate five different types of pasta salad and passed around bottles of dressings and acted like we were upset when we all forgot to bring deserts. The mist from the fountain beat steadily against our backs and sometimes gusts of wind would cover our hair in a white halo that we would smooth down and laugh about. We hid our things under the blanket under a tree as we set off for the middle of the park and sent the kite soaring high above our little heads. We tried to share but they all let me try the most since I had never done it before. A man watched us the whole time, taking pictures of the kite against the city. We pretended not to notice him, but secretly we all felt famous. III. He offered to drive up to the field so we could try it out. My sister told us she’d tag along, “I can’t leave you two alone,” she joked.

He grabbed the kite out of his trunk and offered it to me. I had a Frisbee in my hand that I told him I had never thrown before and he held the kite I told him I had only flown twice. He told me I had no childhood. I didn’t respond. I acted like I didn’t know it wasn’t windy enough because I guess he really wanted to fly it. He acted like he didn’t know that I wasn’t watching the kite, I was watching him.

KENNYWOOD He told me I was riding the one that went upside down. I told him I didn’t want to. He said please. His sister said please. Her husband said please. I said fine. I almost cried a little. I had to count how many times it went in a circle and how many times I would smell funnel cakes and French Fries from 80 feet in the air and he told me I was cute and I told him to shut up. We got on. It went upside down. I was not happy. I scrunched up my neck and I might have drooled a little bit, I don’t remember, and my hair was in my face and I didn’t like it. We got off. I acted like it was no big deal and his sister told me I was cute and I told her to shut up. Something wasn’t right the rest of the day. I knew I had to redeem myself. We should do it again, I told him. He said fine. We got on the ride and I pretended to be happy about it but I was not happy. I didn’t want to look like a baby. He had picked me a flower from one of the bushes and I pretended to really like it and he told me I was a princess or something. I almost cried a little. I remembered how many times it went upside down and smelled the funnel cakes and cheese sauce and counted in my head until-‐ I’m going to puke, I’m going to puke, I’m going to puke. He asked me what are you talking about, trying to yell over the sound of the ride and people having fun. I was not having fun. He told me don’t open your mouth. Take deep breaths. Close your eyes. I said OK and tried to comply. He told me to quit talking. It felt like hours. My stomach was in my chest and I could feel the ice cream we ate earlier sloshing around. We went around and around until finally we stopped. We got off, and he told me I was cute and I told him to shut up. We found a restaurant to sit down in when he told me that in all honesty he felt like he was going to throw up on me when I mentioned it. We talked about school and standardized tests and other countries and maybe it brought us together but I tried to forget I had almost thrown up on him and I wanted to tell him he was cute but I told myself to shut up.

Knot

You know it is summer when you sit on your living room floor, cool. You finally have no responsibilities, almost. Cool. The fan in her room whirred all summer. She feared that if she turned it off, she’d lose what she had found. Cool. He dreamed of creamsicles and ice cream trucks and cute girls by the pool. He never lost his cool. Frozen grapes are childhood treasures. She drops them in her glass to keep her drink cool. She ties her long brown hair up in a knot on her head. He looks on. Cool. There’s nothing quite like finally jumping in the pool after a long week. It shocks your skin – cool. All right, Madi, time to fess up. You worked hard all year. Time to take a break. Cool.

Kids

after matthew rohrer Sunburnt skin on kids, red on white because of too much fun in the sun and no sunscreen or other priorities -‐ Here’s summer synthesizer nights, summer mornings fly away like old bugs, butterfly wings on little kids, towards ends of seasons -‐ September hair frizz is so real, humidity and blood from mosquitos, slapped and dead on arms. Pretentiousness flies through the air on bird backs.