Hymn of the Mardi Gras Flambeau

“nostalgia sweetened with the hope of wishbones... “ideas suddenly pop up like champagne bubbles...

“finely tuned to actualities...

“mature poems of a tireless observer... “anchored in the grit and gristle of a living world... author:

for Cat, Claire and Madeleine

“Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels.”

PETER JOHNSON. EDITOR. THE PROSE POEM: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL

[1] hy M n of the M ardi G ras f L a M beaux

hymn of the mardi gras flambeaux

“But I throw them no cheap Asian trinkets, I toss the Word, the Light, the Succor.”

hy M n of the

they said they’d give me two dollars to lug a cross of fire twenty miles, the longest parade at night, the Krewe of Ascension. I told them I’d carry it free because I know that what I bear is not mere wick and fire and kerosene (every now and then one of those blazing ingots arcs down onto my skin and the pain is extraordinary)

icarry theson of Light as do the others in this chain gang, but they don’t know it. All of us with our blazing crosses as the crowd on each side of the avenue roars with awe and desperation.

“throw me something, mister!” they cry, andi

do have some wretched beads cinched to my belt; they even dangle from clips in my hood in case I run out.

But I throw them no cheap Asian trinkets, I toss the Word, the Light, the Succor. And when their fingers clasp my beads I transfer His fire to their flesh and I redeem them, as did their Savior, I stumbling toward Golgotha with Him, my fellow flambeau as well, with Him.

there are not three crosses staked on that skullshaped hill but thousands, millions, and our torches too will rise to the Kingdom, and we too shall climb out of this conflagration on the wings of our own ashes.

“The stink of moldy hay and stale beer mesh with horse droppings in the street”

i’m six or seven and we’re standing on Canalstreet, my dad, mom and sister, who’s too young to remember any of this. It’s late February but so hot the air ripples like cellophane. The sky, a scratched sheet of slate, dangles over Maison Blanche; the crowds between us and storefront glass threaten to stampede at any moment. But you never give up a place on the front row, not for your life.

Masses of screaming, happy people scurrying for worthless largesse. My sister and I have already caught more beads and doubloons than we need, but that’s the idea – amassing doodads and trinkets out of pure greed because it’s Mardi Gras and that’s what you do.

aprimed pick-up lurches before us only to sputter, cough and stop. It looks like any other parade truck but it’s idling, so we notice the theme: Acadian Paradise. A loudspeaker blasts bluegrass and the people aboard cavort to the beat like mimes. The whole procession has come to a halt. We hate when this happens because after a while the krewe stops throwing and everyone gets bored.

this one young guy is so drunk he hangs over a rickety wooden rail of the truck. His hair is slicked back with pomade and his face, smeared with white paint. In one hand he clutches a bottle of Dixie, in the other, a Zulu cocoanut. He’s having a great time, laughing, flirting with pretty girls in the crowd, puking onto the asphalt, handing out entire plastic bags of glass beads strung in Czechoslovakia. We like him because he’s not stingy. He leans way over, nearly upside down, to give my sister one of those bags.

aband starts up in the distance, snare drums, trumpets, Sousa... and the parade rolls again. Acadian Paradise backfires, lunges, and the young guy topples over the rail, his head pinned under a rear tire. It happens instantaneously and the crowd’s roar abruptly stops. The silence feels like pressure at the bottom of a sea. Nothing moves except the black, vulcanized, dusty, rimless, splotched tire which takes forever to crush his skull.

We hear a rip, the way it sounds when you tear off the outer shell of a cocoanut. Someone cries out. The truck screeches to another halt. We see the mangled head, bloody now with yellowish fluid seeping out of what were once ears. How could we not? We’re on the front line, dad, mom, my sister and I.

My white and brown shoes are maybe three feet from the damage. And they’re wet. The young man’s body quivers and then fuses for good with the street.

The crowds remain eerily silent. The driver kneels down and howls. I start to scream and jump up and down. Just jump, that’s what I do, and scream.

Mom takes one hand, Dad the other, and they push me and my sister through a turbulent sea of bodies. We’re blocks away and I’m still hysterical. Dad finally cradles me in his arms and carries me to the Dodge wagon parked on Elysian Fields, a long walk from Canal Street. They throw my shoes out of the window as we race home

— and my sister’s bag of foreign beads too.

(sometimesithink our flight from that obesetuesday has never really ended, that my scream lies buried in a Canal Street sewer like some one-of-a-kind carnival bauble. And I remember him, the generous, jovial young man, his face white as Florida,who tossed us a life.)

“We were poseurs, Dilettantes before a recipe we could not decipher.”

I went to Dooky Chase to get something to eat...

–Ray Charles

once

some friends andi, white people,

Went to dine at Dooky Chase,

The soul food restaurant in New Orleans

That Ray sings about in “Early in the Morning.”

The place was packed. Everyone was black

But us so of course we got some stares. This was before civil rights had blossomed

And no one yet knew the boundaries. But we’d heard the food was fabulous

and it was.

nowican’t

remember

If I had the stuffed cabbage or red beans

Or maybe the grillards and grits.

What sticks is the festive atmosphere, Everybody having a grand ole time,

The happiness. Imagine, happiness!

Because my friends and I were reading Sartre at the time, Schopenhauer, Celine.

We weren’t happy.

Which may

account for the stares,

Not merely because we were white sore thumbs

Throbbing out of the molasses, but were glum

Even as we devoured the joyous victuals.

It occurs to me now that those diners

Were the real existentialists, carpe dieming

Each salty, savory moment.

We were poseurs, Dilettantes before a recipe we could not decipher. Some years later Katrina destroyed the place

But they vowed to rebuild.

the fat man at the aquarium

“Our

feet ache — the children sob and whine in this sizzling humidity... that bounty of flesh, the fragile heart flapping inside like butterfly wings...”

one: our feet ache — the children sob and whine in this sizzling humidity... that bounty of flesh, the fragile heart flapping inside like butterfly wings, reports of epidemic heat strokes. They move at such a labored pace, it takes me no time as we trudge on blistering asphalt from our van. Only my mother, at seventy-five, doesn’t complain; she seems energized by heat that bakes the rest of us. I straddle behind to take videos of her, my wife and the kids as they walk, pictures I already have from last summer. Not much has changed though Maddie and Claire have sprouted a few more inches.

We still need the stroller for Maddie or else she’ll cave in halfway through the trek and screech until the only sane option is to leave.

soi’m about fifty yards behind, focusing, when the fat man and a woman emerge and wedge themselves between me and my troop. I keep shooting. The man is behemoth, at least four feet wide, and supports himself on titanium canes which I’m guessing will snap at any moment. He and the woman also head for the aquarium.

I’m just about out of steam and can’t fathom why a human boulder would want to venture out — and

I’m slow— to pass them and rejoin my family which has come to consist solely of women.

iremember coming here with another little girl, another daughter, lost now... or perhaps I invent the memory for its depth. But my mother did bring that other child here often, when I was far away in the mountains flattened on a mattress like a dying man, dispossessed. But we’re here now with new children and what’s left of the old folks— and I can only rejoice at the tendrils of fate that coil around our lives with delicate zeal.

two:silhouettes of my girls before a luminous, room-sized tank of sharks. Maddie wears the blue visor we bought at Wings in Florida, Claire an identical visor except pink. Their frailty overwhelms me. I feel a rush of panic at the closeness of my daughters to beasts that could devour them in an eye blink. So I move in, steadying the camera. They giggle, call the sharks silly names and just horse around. The tank also contains swordfish and crafty old tortoises ancient as the earth itself. My mother rests on a bleacher and Cathy takes the girls’ hands.

...another silhouette.

from nowhere, the fat man appears.he sways, gazes dreamily at the buoyancy of the fish, in envy, I imagine — such tonnage floating so serenely while he can scarcely manage with crutches. But he’s too close to the girls, to Cathy. I don’t want him there, in the videos, in our memories. He edges closer, the canes clanking. I move toward the brass rails and tug at Cathy’s wrist, whisper into her ear and we all quickly leave the exhibit for another room.

the fat man’s shadow now consumes the entire space my wife and children had occupied. I am relieved to pass into the next section, silly penguins poking up from fake ice dunes like tuxedoed clowns. Claire and Maddie think they’re hilarious.

despite record temperatures outside,iwould not trade places. Cold, not hot, I’ve learned, is hell— why Dante encased Satan in a slab of ice. I hear my mother laugh and know for the moment all is well. She adjusts Maddie’s visor, which has fallen to her nose. I also know the woman with the fat man is not his mother or wife. Sister maybe, his last linkage with that easy, wondrous realm of women.

does my lost child remember the penguins, did she admire or find them boring? I wonder if she too hates the cold. I have had to dis-learn everything I once knew about her because facts change with time, before we can even gasp.

three: ipeer into the lighted cubicle of glass at a sole, flamboyant jelly-fish: translucent, a fanfare of silken, diaphanous scarves, clouds and cobwebs strewn from a thickened, pulsating nexus. The creature, ethereal, sovereign, majestically alone, flutters in willowy silence as if undaunted by its entrapment. I recall dead ones washed up on a Florida beach, dozens, as we strolled the shore of a continent, the surf meeting our feet like vaporous syrup. The sea had disposed of them and would with a change of tides reclaim them.

Hunks of yellow, jellied, rubbery meat, no longer angelic, no longer beautiful.

the girls don’t seem interested soistand here alone and permit myself a moment of simple awe. My daughters prefer the sardines, silvery little streaks zigzagging spastically, some colliding into the glass. These too... degraded into tin cans, slivers with tubes of blackness at the center. Backbones? There’s another tank in this room with shrimp and sea horses and ghostly, spidery things that glide over the sand with the grace of ballerinas.

the girls can’t take their eyes off the strangely noble sea-horses, surely some happy mistake of evolution. I try to zoom in but know that they’re too small and won’t show up when we’re home, watching the movies. The jelly-fish will. Just the right amount of light. I captured it last year — and spent many a night staring at the screen, the VCR on pause, transfixed. No need to probe outer space for aliens. They’re right here, with us all along. I have not seen the fat man. Perhaps we’ve lost him. Perhaps such minuscule specimens do not interest him.

My mother says she’s hungry.the girls clamor for French fries and ketchup. I could use some coffee. We check the directory and note a McDonald’s one flight up. My mother says, “I took Sophie once when she still couldn’t pronounce hamburger. She called it ham-ma-ka. So we sat there eating ham-ma-kas with ketchup but no pickles. It was nice. Lou, where does the time go? She was younger than Claire now. Still a baby.” Still a baby.

Riding one of the sea horses, lassoing a sardine or two, screeching at the fat man who bobs near the surface like a great whale, Get out of my ocean!

four: now we’re seated at the table, the girls restless, wolfing down their fries, Mom picking at her sandwich, Cathy with a cheeseburger, I inhaling the steam from a very rank cup of coffee. This is New Orleans after all, you’d think... McDonald’s! We could be in China. The walls are glass and we watch ships and barges glide on the Mississippi, wider here than anywhere. When the fat man and his consort arrive, Cathy groans. He lowers himself onto a plastic chair at an adjacent table while the woman goes off to order. It seems they have become part of our trip, our family, archetypal omens torpedoed out of some dream. But what dream? What do they represent? Signs, a universe of signs: sharks, jellyfish, sardines, ham-ma-kas, the heat... the fat man.

the woman returns with a tray stacked with heavy, oily burgers. No glandular distress here, just basic gluttony. The fat man tears off a paper wrapper and consumes half the sandwich in a single bite. The woman merely observes, says nothing.

then he’s onto a second, a third— the woman doesn’t touch a thing— and, if we’ve counted right, a fourth and fifth. He seems rhapsodic, closes his eyes and davens as he chews, spittle and bits of food inching down his chin. Every now and then he looks at me and I could swear he smirks. Does he want to make sure I am digesting as well, the scene, his enormity, his ravenous despair?

ashrine to sadness, he seems, a warning.

five:

i’m at a loss to translate.the signs sing like unseen birds. We listen and return to our toothpicks and buttons and combs. We have missed either everything or nothing — The kids fiddle with packets of sugar and powdered cream. Mom tells Cathy the story about some relative who disappeared and wound up in a crumbling cloister for nuns. I gaze out at the river and try not to remember too much. Another river, in the mountains, I waded into it... and lay my back on a rock rising from its center. The sun glazed me with soothing warmth as icy currents snaked around my body. I’d been left for dead, an exhibit myself, father of no one, my own grotesque shadow...

Mom touches my hand — “Where are you, honey?

A thousand miles away? We’re taking the kids to the bathroom.” I tell them I’ll finish my coffee and meet them at the door, watch them vanish, Maddie secured in the stroller. The fat man’s woman has gone off to observe the river. So it’s just the two of us now, I with what remains of cool, acidic coffee, he with a pile of powdered apple pies.

something is going on.

he nods, skewers my eye... that smirk again.inod in return, avert my eyes and leave the table to wait outside a female restroom, where men have always waited. In the gift shop the girls fondle just about every doo-dad and stuffed animal heaped in the bins; in the gift shop I browse for something that doesn’t yet exist; in the gift shop my mother picks out sea shells for her grandchildren as Cathy flips through sweats and t-shirts.

in the gift shop,imurder the fat man.

six:ibeat him to death with his own canes. I gouge out his audacious eyes with the tapered spiral of a conch; I stuff rubber alligators into his foul vacuole of a mouth; I set him afire with my lighter and kick the blubbery carcass. It’s quite a spectacle, but visitors go about their business as usual and hardly notice. I kill him for abducting my lost daughter, for mayhem of spirit, for lack of equipoise, for getting too close to Cathy, Maddie and Claire, for the obscenity of his being, for enslaving his sister, caretaker or whatever, she who has dropped to her knees to sob in grief.

ikill him for imposing severity into our memories, for sweating too much, for leaving the death bed to visit an aquarium, for devouring the world, for diving into a tank of sharks, for strangling the jelly fish with his swollen fingers, for loitering near female bathrooms... I kill him for all of us, for the world, for justice and peace of mind, for atonement.

but he does not die.he grows fatter, wipes off the ashes, extracts black reptiles from his mouth and rises like a ziggurat breaking from the sea surface. Thus we return to our car, in sweltering August, lugging plastic bags of souvenirs, pamphlets and brochures, leftover fries, the camera bobbing at my side like an anchor.

the fat man pours pop corn into his mouth, tears chunks from a Milky Way with his blood-wet teeth, swigs a two-liter bottle of Pepsi. The consort cups his swollen elbow with her fingertips.

and this is the way it will be, always the fat man at our sides, in our dreams and memories, our futures, as the film yellows and disintegrates, as time itself

hummingbird grill

“...open 24 hours a day, one of those dives that didn’t have to advertise.”

PHOTO: DA v ID LEESON , NOLA COM

one of my favorites ondecaturstreet –where all the bums, losers, stoners, drunks and ruined people hung out... man, it was cheap & greasy with a short order cook who looked like Sponge Bob before Sponge Bob was born. I drank a lot of coffee there, loved the hash browns & grits and sometimes, never knew when, an uptown princess staggered in after a heavy night at Las Casas de los Marinos across from Jax Brewery when it still brewed beer and the earthy smell of hops saturated the Square...

[Open 24 hours a day, one of those dives that didn’t have to advertise]

the C ity C are for G ot, or...

the city care forgot, or... duke alexis alexandrovitch romanoff meets buffalo bill, after which he travels to new orleans for mardi gras

“If ever I cease to love. May the Grand Duke Ride a buffalo In a Texan rodeo.”

the C ity C are for G ot, or...

he moped inrussia’s expansive gloom, tossed weary pebbles into the Dnieper and dreamed of buffalo in America. Vodka was not his drink. He preferred the filigreed bouquet of French Chablis. And Slavic women, how coarse.

inamerica they were like canaries he’d heard sailors say. So he booked passage for St. Louis and introduced himself to Buffalo Bill who took him to Omaha where they joined Custer, Sheridan and a team of cowboys and founded “Camp Alexis.” He fell in love with Spotted Tail’s daughter... If ever I cease to love... and persuaded her to join him in Denver. Bill taught him how to shoot. The enraged beast nearly gorged him to death. And that was that. He’d killed it.

What’s next? Topeka, Jefferson City, Louisville, Memphis, New Orleans.

he fell in love with the divine Lydiathompson who sang “If ever I cease to love” in “Bluebeard” ...The Creoles adored her enough to name a baseball team after her. The city was so excited about his Royal Highness it annulled the government to form

The Krewe of Rex. All night Alexis danced the quadrille with Lydia aboard the James Howard docked at Gravier Street Wharf.

the next night he attendediltrovatore at thefrench Opera House and disappeared discreetly after the show.

On Mardi Gras Day they erected a throne across from City Hall on St. Charles St. Louis Saloman, merchant, first King of Rex, draped in purple velvet and rhinestones, reared his horse to salute the Duke and Alexis bowed regally.

are for G

if evericease to love, sang the first band, dropping their instruments, If ever I cease to love. May the Grand Duke Ride a buffalo In a Texan rodeo.

there followed a procession of thekukluxklan, carriages full of smiling Chinese clothiers, Dan Rice’s Famous Troupe of Trained Animals, caricatures of Lincoln and Grant, marching formations of Turks, Indians and Arabs, vans advertising Warner’s Bitters, The Singer Sewing Machine, Mme. Tigau’s Elixir for Ladies and Dr. Tichenor’s Antiseptic

butalexis took the parody of Lydia’s song and grew gloomy and dull, could not be persuaded to dance and refused “most of the invitations extended to him, failing to keep at least one appointment with Lydia Thompson and presenting his new little friend [an actress] with a bracelet of diamonds and pearls when at last he departed New Orleans forever.”

We can only presume that the cold, windswept form wrapped in bearskins, trudging across endless steppes, gleaned in the Krewe a future without him, crazed anarchists, festering cells of saboteurs, wild democracy, insolent, wicked canaries, death.

katrina

still standing.

...nineteen silly penguins spewed from the Aquarium out of ten thousand dead and missing.

Look. ...there’s one perched atop the fluorescent dome of the Whitney Bank!

“I know if I stay in the Quarter it will kill me so I plan to move but not right now...”

ruby ruby

everyone’s sitting on decorative iron chairs arranged in an ellipse in the backyard patio of some place in the Quarter lush with tropical ferns and banana and kumquat trees and they’re passing the weed right and left and booze too, lots of it, and fried shrimp and oysters and crawfish, and I’m here with a friend but don’t know the others, which is the way it goes in the Vieux Carre,one party after another every night until sunrise, our raison d’être even if we stagger to work the next day with hangovers vast as canyons or fail to show at all, fuzzy and limp, the way we normally feel as we waste our lives, and I know if I stay in the Quarter it will kill me so I plan to move but not right now...

i’ve got my sights on this cherubic redhead a few chairs down on the opposite side of the group and catch her eyeballing me when she thinks I’m not looking but she’s so gorgeous I figure why waste my time? and besides I’ve gotta pee and ask this guy where are the bathrooms and he points back toward the slave quarters and I make my way over and it’s a quaint little one-room apartment now, this place where probably fifty slaves lived, and the bathroom’s off to the side, so I take my time and do the business

...and asistep back into the main room the redhead (copper, really) is standing there stark naked so I just mosey over, crush her into my arms and kiss her right off and she’s fired up, and we start pressing into each other when someone else comes in to use the john and rears back when he sees us and says “excuse me” and rushes out so I tell red to get dressed, we’re splitting, and by dress I mean her metallic aqua hot pants and a halter, that’s it, and golden thongs for shoes and I lead her by the waist through the patio waving goodbye to everyone, and the filigreed gates lead us directly onto Bourbon Street, and I wonder exactly how I got here but it doesn’t matter...

...we make our way through the crowds arm in arm, sometimes stopping to grope and kiss, and Lafitte’s

Blacksmith Shop is only a block down so I say let’s go there and she’s fine with that and the place is packed with mostly old prunish people hogging the piano croaking I did it my way so we find a table way in the back where it’s dark and order vodka martinis on the rocks and begin the probing who are you? what’s your name? where do you work? do you know so and so?

...and turns out her name isruby and she’s a bona fide hooker but not a street tramp, a high class call girl at Lucky Pierre’s which they say the Mafia owns and I’m of course amazed and a bit wary and tell her I don’t pay for women, never have, never will, (though of course men always pay for women whether they know it or not and in so many ways and maybe it’s vice-versa but I don’t know about that) and if you’re trying to nab a client you’ve got the wrong guy and she says no she’s not working, she just likes me, thinks I’m funny and smart...

(so why doifeel so sad and stupid?) and wants to hang out, which I can’t fathom but so be it, and I ask about disease and she says she’s clean and I believe her because passion requires faith and when I ask why she wants to be a whore she says she makes more money in half a week than all her friends in a month typing up memos for assholes and she has a little boy to feed and wants to spend time with him and whenever you do anything you don’t want to do for money you’re a whore, and I agree...

so she dropped out of high school because she needed capital (I hear Karl Marx growling in the background) and yet she’s brilliant in her way, and I feel low thinking about all the idiots who finish high school and even college because their parents can afford it but Ruby doesn’t even know her father and her mother got lost years back, a coke head, and maybe she died... and this woman Ruby at only twenty-three is calm, gentle, serene almost, taking care of herself and her baby, all alone, and she’s classically beautiful too and probably doesn’t need to be a prostitute though what the hell, she’s right, we’re all prostitutes...

...andisee her for quite a while though it’s mostly all libido, we never go out, she just comes over when she can, and she’s definitely a pro, knows exactly what to do and I feel like a bumpkin beside her and learn a lot, but her vocation finally bothers me so much that I move out of my apartment and don’t leave a forwarding address and I never see her again even if she still visits my mind...

...andiwish icould make amends for disappearing, maybe send her a fat check or wad of cash, paying when I don’t need to because you sure can’t send valentines to hookers, that is, to myself, since I guess I’m the real hooker in this potlatch...

...andican’t stop thinking about all those slaves crammed into that cubbyhole.

schwegmann memories

“Oh, she was a mammoth woman...

JUST MARRIED smeared in lipstick on the fenders of her car... to the bumpers.”

PHOTO: O PENING DA y OF THE S CHWEGMANN ’ S ON O LD G ENTILL y R OAD , N O v. 25, 1957. C OURTES y: T HE C HARLES L. F RANCK S TUDIO C OLLECTION AT T HE H ISTORIC N EW O RLEANS C OLLECTION ,

this was the pre-Walmart superstore ofnew Orleans with multiple locations, a big one near the Industrial Canal. As mid-teens we drove there, fought the traffic and crowds, because it carried weird stuff like chocolate-covered ants, which we had to sample. Tasted sort of like a chocolate bar with Rice Crispies —but you knew the crisps were big black ants and that changed everything.

one time a friend of mine got caught shop-lifting and spent time with the police. Once a gay guy approached me out in the parking lot, a first, and, given the times, I fled. But the most enduring image of Schwegmann’s rooted in my mind is that of a giant woman of unknown ethnicity leaping out shotgun from a sedan in full wedding regalia, veil and all, a cigarette dangling from her lips, headed for the pharmacy section. I was loading groceries into my Pinto and saw her return with a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in one hand and a jug of Epsom salts in the other.

oh, she was a mammoth woman, perhaps a transvestite, JUST MARRIED smeared in lipstick on the fenders of her car, strings of Blue Runner red bean cans tied to the bumpers.

islid into thepinto, laughed and chewed another chocolate cube loaded with ants.

saint louis cathedral

“I kneel and pray for more than God can possibly bestow or deign to bestow.”

for it was still a cathedral back then with crowds in Jackson Square and the uproar of locusts stapled to the limbs of live oaks like parishioners in pews.

these casual goings on in the pewter light of day

soothe my mind – which may be why the Baroness de Pontalba, prey to some secret despair below her station, built her mansion across the street. It, not she, remains.

here lies a tattooed sailor nestled in the shadow of Old Hickory’s statue. Children stare at his jellied eyes and deem him ancient, though I guess thirty at most. The scent of hops clings to the air like a nuance of desire.

they’re brewing Jax again on the river.ihave seen these pigeons before too, lowly black sheep of doves, huddled upon the concrete hair of Saint Francis in Pirate’s Alley. Tourists pass outside the iron fence ready to pay, posing for portraits or caricatures, and always disappointed; they deal remotely with the artists who tempt them to believe, for once, in their own beauty –like “The Cap’n” here, a battered, grouchy water colorist wearing the clothes he slept in, slouched in his lawn chair, coaxing young girls, like century plants, to burrow roots into a canvass. I once paid one of the artists thirty-five dollars for a portrait because she was so beautiful I had no choice. But the picture came out bad.

the cathedral doors were locked wheniwanted to get in at midnight. Now tourists invade, raucous with clouds of cotton candy, Hurricane glasses and Polaroids. We ignore the mourners, mumbling over beads, and move on, they to Café du Monde and praline shops, I toward the altar, my own beads cinched around my mind like regrets.

ikneel and pray for more than God can possibly bestow or deign to bestow.

street strip joint

“We could get in at fifteen if we slipped the barker a dollar— and we did—my buddies and me, pimple-cursed and horny enough to power a missile.”

We could get in at fifteen if we slipped the barker a dollar— and we did—my buddies and me, pimple-cursed and horny enough to power a missile.

The bill we tended was rumpled, soggy and smelled like skin— into the palm of that oily galoot in ribbed undershirt, fuzzy tattoos of anchors or skulls on his knotty arms, a guy we just knew stabbed people in back alleys and hack-sawed the bodies.

he drooled, whispered salaciously into our ears like a buzzing insect and held open the door a sliver so we could sample the flesh— and that’s all it took, a sliver.

So we shelled another dollar each for cover. The “receptionist,” someone’s flabby grandmother with spiked blue hair and onion-colored lipstick smeared down her chin, led us up the smoky aisle by our fingertips to the wooden platform they called a stage.

We ordered Dixie by the pitcher on Tuesday nights when the place was empty except for some old men propped against the back wall like mummies.

they weren’t dead; they coughed and sometimes moaned, delight or pain, who knows?

Most of the dancers looked older than our mothers; they gyrated around poles smacking gum with cigarettes glued to their lower lips. We howled and booed—you’re not kind at fifteen— until, as always, some young angel in rhinestoned high heels and slatted pasties dangling from her nipples like tiny Venetian blinds. The gold lame G-string concealed her only enough to make us regulars.

“take it all off, baby,” we pleaded as she strutted to the brass of “Peter Gunn” and stuck out her glorious ass, that ass, our religion almost. We couldn’t care less about her lack of talent, her life, her personality or mind...

...that’s the way it was in those days.all the same we might have married her had she but graced us with one smile as we tossed quarters at her bare feet, coins she scooped before they hit the floor and stuffed into invisible pockets of her body. We drove home in silence, broke, broken, cemented in private, animal torment.

for years, imagine, ontuesday nights.if sometimes we think about her, wonder how she turned out or if she remembers us, however dimly, we, the punks whose lives she ruined, it’s because we know how stupid we were.We knew then. But she was our first love— and every woman since has had to measure up, adorn that stage, make us pay.

tchoupitoulas street

“...only a song I can’t remember that made me so happy”

i’m on a seedy section oftchoupitoulas and outside a run-down warehouse someone has trashed all sorts of wonderful stuff—mahogany desks, bookcases, lamps, office supplies— and I park illegally to retrieve some of it though others have also gathered to make a haul and in particular an old man and his wife who eye me suspiciously... it’s sweltering and their windows are down and the radio blasts out this songI know well so I start to sing along boisterously as I drag a desk over to the hatch of my station wagon

ising andising andising but now that the past is overi can’t remember the song, a song I love, akin to something by Tony Williams of the Platters, but not the Platters and, damn, it’s the only thing that matters, not the desk, not Tchoupitoulas street, nothing...

...only a song I can’t remember that made me so happy

sears nights

“Dad liked to run the car with the wipers on Even when it wasn’t raining.“

in those daysiwould ride with my dad

Over to Sears in the Gentilly East mall, Already run-down, shoddy and sad.

Katrina would finish it off years later.

I realize now that Dad had no reason

To make those drives other than Wanting to get away for a spell. He tinkered with the bins of screws and bolts,

rubbed them between his fingers as if to test Their solidity.

He didn’t really need them

But always bought a few.

This was before Lowe’s and Home Depot

When Sears actually sold single screws And nuts and washers and carriage bolts.

Later

we might cross the street

To FrosTop and drink those icy mugs Of root beer that tasted like Castoria.

Dad liked to run the car with the wipers on Even when it wasn’t raining. As he sipped He would hum some Mozart motet to the beat

Of those wipers.

We didn’t talk much.

There was a night club called Pussy Cat Lounge

Right next to FrosTop but it would be

A while before my friends and I ventured there.

At the time it seemed evil to me

With its multi-colored neon insignia

Of a glass of champagne, complete

With bubbles evaporating above.

One time I saw a woman strut in, A cigarette dangling from her lip,

A woman I might have died for a few years later.

Dad noticed too.

ihad watched his eyes follow her in the rear view as she approached.

This is how largesse comes into and disappears

From our lives, in glances, reflections, Momentary glimpses.

dad,i’m

speaking to you now in a way

I didn’t then. Because the memory of Sears

And those ridiculous screws and bolts

Suddenly popped into my mind like

One of Pussycat’s champagne bubbles— and it’s already fading.

iwant

to tell you how muchiliked

Those drives, away from homework, weeknights, Mom and Ruthie, waiting for us with a plate

Of hot cross buns, molten sugar dripping

Down the sides of dough, stupid TV shows.

you can’t

buy single wood screws any more

And those pre-packaged are half plastic now.

The heads strip unless you go really slow

And aim that driver squarely into the groove.

You told me once that things don’t change,

They thicken.

Well, can’t say I agree.

I think they dissolve.

But I know what you meant.

the best po-boy

“It’s what’s her name or nothing because we stick with what we crave and give up craving anything else.

once, not in aleppo, notbyzantium, not stonyprague, butbogalusa, Louisiana,I found a corner dive, the kind decorated with gaudy metal Coca-Cola signs and hand-written specials on blackboard slate, that served the best shrimp po-boys ever concocted, hell, maybe it wasn’t Bogalusa but Domilici’s on Annunciation Street. Those who indulge know that every po-boy is different, every chef fiddles with the ingredients and degree of ketchup, horseradish, Tabasco... the white sauces don’t cut it at all. So when you come across the Platonic sine qua non, you slip into a gustatory sublime and spread the gospel.

it’s religious, of course. And does this not apply to just about any summum bonum? The purpose of metaphor. I alone am come to tell ye! No finer woman than what’s her name down in Bogalusa way back. Best Dodge Dart I’ve ever driven!

but as to what’s her name, here’s the glitch: nothing else that comes along will do. It’s what’s her name or nothing because we stick with what we crave and give up craving anything else. Whereas, we all know, a finer sedan, a finer woman, a finer po-boy may lie inches away around the corner.

but we won’t even sniff, taste or sample.

We’re buried in the tomb of nonpareil.

We know our Plato.

The heavenly fix before Heaven.

I knew the man—no democrat let me tell you.

Gave him a bite of my po-boy, let him fondle my what’s her name for the sake of comparative ecstasy.

And it’s absolutes ever since, absolute misery over what we’ve lost and what we refuse to find anew. and this we call judgment.

burdine’s, broad street

“Words I did not understand but could hear, For they clamored like the bells of St. Rosa”

howiloved

the acrid smell of the place,

A school & office supply store

Around the corner from St. Rosa’s. But I’m the only one−my sister And cousins found it miserable, boring, Worse than Sunday school.

So I would plead with the women, Mom and Meem, on our treks to Bayou Road,

To detour onto bustling Broad

And let me look around, savor, touch

Own the place for a hangnail of time−

the powdery

rubber bands assorted by size

In countless wooden bins, the stacks Of white paper, parchment, vellum, The scissors displays, the rubber cement And chrome staplers, the enameled green Paper cutters and wire mesh baskets.

I wanted it all, dreamed about Burdine’s

As others surely dream of heaven, And sometimes in those dreams...

the

sheets of paper became alive,

Engraved with fiery words, and formed books

Of revelation too blindingly bright to read,

And the Parker pens would inscribe

Glossy black words onto sheets of pure air,

Words I did not understand but could hear,

For they clamored like the bells of St. Rosa

And washed me with the ink of what I can only call holiness. When they closed the store

No one noticed, despite liquidation prices

Up to ninety percent.

bayouroad

had become dangerous by then,

Meem Too old for the sojourn... all of us too old,

Too distracted by juicier interests.

And yet that old store with its hardwood floors

And office supplies stacked to the rafters Still returns to me in dreams, not often now

But enough to remind me of everything

I once craved and how craving itself

Eventually wanes and you can’t replace it.

“I got drunk at the Napoleon House, during the days when getting drunk was an option”

one night

igot drunk at thenapoleonhouse, during the days when getting drunk was an option, on green and yellow chartreuse, such potent, disgustingly sweet poisons, and found myself standing atop a glossy table reciting poetry I had memorized years before (with Debussy playing in the back room where all the eggheads gathered) and let me tell you that poetry I still have memorized–Auden, Donne, Blake, Yeats, some Eliot & Stevens...

...how can you go wrong? and there was this chick with golden oats for hair and no lipstick (I hate lipstick) & Asiatic eyes, though she had Viking and Icelandic genes (hell, Icelanders ARE Vikings) well, she pulled me down from the table and smacked me good on the lips with her lips and wow, I thought, look what poetry can do! It turned me off for a moment or two when she told me she only had one lung so I had to eenie meenie miny mo it until I moved back toward her lips and thereafter her hips (as the music changed from French fluff to mad, diabolical Liszt) and I breathed for both of us.

mother goose returns

“The clink of my mother’s wedding band on a cold bottle of milk delivered fresh to the front door by the local dairy man”

i.

the clink of my mother’s wedding band on a cold bottle of milk delivered fresh to the front door by the local dairy man.

ii.

Grandfather stands trembling in the doorway clad in flappy underwear,his mind flappier, startled to see me, a stranger now, smiling at him as he stares.

iii.

Grandmother slides a jar of honey across the table to where I sit;she asks me to open that jar of honey her fingers can’t manage it.

iV.

inuncle’s yard we clacked stalks of sugar cane and with Jack’s knife we whacked a stalk and sipped its sweet juice clean.

V.

My mother beating on the chest of Mr.barker lying slumped behind the wheel of his Plymouth in the driveway across the street, the women screeching, I pale with horror. I had never seen death before. I was Columbus veering into unknown seas. I was tomorrow.

Vi.

the peg-legged dead man clomped along our sidewalk in the fog of dawn.His long lost love they say he sought, that lady with the frozen heart.

Vii.

MaMaw screeching on the porch Jackieeeeee —she blasted bananas from our tree. Jack was deaf. I heard for him and he heard me.

Viii.

our school had a special room for crippled kids in wheel chairs, the wooden ones with seats of cane. They were more than lame. They growled and huffed like bears. and solidified our fears.

strange how the brain remembers tastes like the chunks of molasses candy my dad once brought back from a bakery on Carrollton Avenue where he drove every Sunday for his cream cheese. That cream cheese was nothing like what supermarkets now pass off as the same; true curds and whey, it was, soupy, disgusting to my sister and me though Dad slurped it up like ambrosia. But the molasses candy, ah...

...many decades have passed and I have not yet encountered that taste anywhere, sometimes close, but not quite.

some secret ingredient maybe, some herb no longer used. Who knows? But if I close my eyes and wash out the present with a grand mind-sweep I can conjure it up again as if at this very moment I am guiding one of those chunks onto my tongue and the original sweetness. I am seven years old again and Dad spoons in that cream cheese with a delight akin to mine.

We balanced on the cobblestones ofbayouroad.the women charged into the butcher shop for prime cuts and t-bones and then to the Choctaw Market for a living chicken as all along we teetered on those cobblestones.

xii.

We charged from Columbusstreet up Esplanade to the corner K&B, Grandma hobbling behind us, holes cut in her shoes to soothe her aching feet. She dug into her coin purse to treat us to another sweet.

xiii.

arag & bottle man’s wagon aslant

on the concrete, his junk strewn all over the street, the rag man himself dazed and down, a wheel spoke splintered across his lap, when the horse collapsed of a heat stroke.

xiV.

riding withdad in a pickup truck to unload trash at the city dump, a place aswirl with fire and ash. Ruthie and I hop and jump amid the waste as Dad slips cash to the man in charge of this burial mass of rusted springs and bones and shattered glass.

aChecker cab idling in the street.uncle’s back for a bite to eat. Around the block on his porch swing

Pinhead rocks. He drools, he coos, and when we pass he starts to sing. Mom says he came out wrong which is why he sings those songs. He’s not a child like you and Ruth; he won’t live long, that’s the truth.

xVi:

We callernst Watermelon when he passes.he’s so fat he sways from side to side and cracks the sidewalk. We don’t know how old he is but Mom says he’s old enough. We squirt him with our water guns but he can’t catch us because he’s slow but growls he’ll kill us when he does. \

xVii:

aback yard full of wooden crosses where our pets are long buried. Looks like Arlington, Dad says as we lower our heads and pray.

xViii.

We swung on Grandpa’s wooden back yard gate until it creaked, sagged and split in half. And Grandpa had a howling fit. xix.

at the picnic in strutsuncledutch.

Dad says he bootlegs whisky. He’s drunk of course but not too much. He’s always frisky, loud and fun He makes us laugh. We don’t care what bad things he’s done.

one-hundred-year-old Missyunt, the witch, cursing me and Jack for tossing street shells at her screen, her voice a hoarse cream that only I could hear since Jack had ripped apart the straps criss-crossing his chest and back that held the clunky hearing aid intact.

bats from the palm tree attackedpapaw’s hair, left him bloody and bald. He still takes it hard. So Jack and I hurl rocks at their lair but nothing’s there. That was long ago, PaPaw winks, Doesn’t happen anymore.

xxii.

some men shot the patrons down in a Laundromat on Bayou Road. The police said it was a crime of passion. You wondered what that meant but figured you would learn in time.

xxiii.

Grandma mashes garlic with her mortar and pestle; the scent throughout the house does drift. Before long we all can tell we shall shortly eat that smell.

the primal tone of Gallo’s poetry: ...cosmic melancholy tempered with bursts of Proustian privileged moments, the anti-voltage of nostalgia sweetened with the hope of wishbones, the sweetness of cupcakes.

--Justin Askins, author of Neversink,

onscherzofuriant:

amind well stocked with poetic lore, historical detail, and metaphysical perplexities, where ideas suddenly pop up like champagne bubbles...

—Ricardo

Nirenberg, Editor, Offcourse Literary Journal; author of Cry Uncle and Wave Mechanics

on Crash: asequence of Variations

Louis Gallo is a poet who is finely tuned to actualities with the ability to exhibit them from unexpected angles.

—Kristina Kocan, author of S ˇ ara, 2008; Kolesa in murve, 2014; S ˇ ivje, 2018. Maribor, Slovenia

onarchaeology:

these are the mature poems of a tireless observer, a person of intense, articulated feeling, one who has remained an eager and fascinated student way beyond the call.

—Ralph Adamo, editor the Xavier Review, author of Ever

hy M n of the

bibliography: five volumes of Louis Gallo’s poetry, Archaeology, Scherzo Furiant, Crash, Clearing the Attic, Ghostly Demarcation & The Pandemic Papers are now available... As are Why is there Something Rather than Nothing? and Leeway & Advent. His work appears in Best Short Fiction 2020. A novella, “The Art Deco Lung,” appears in Storylandia. National Public Radio aired a reading and discussion of his poetry on its “With Good Reason” series (December 2020). His work has appeared or will shortly appear in Wide Awake in the Pelican State (LSU anthology), Southern Literary Review, Fiction Fix, Glimmer Train, Hollins Critic, Rattle, Southern Quarterly, Litro, New Orleans Review, Xavier Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Texas Review, Baltimore Review, Pennsylvania Literary

Journal, The Ledge, storySouth, Houston Literary Review, Tampa Review, Raving Dove, The Journal (Ohio), Greensboro Review, and many others. Chapbooks include “The Truth Changes”, “The Abomination of Fascination”, “Status Updates” and “The Ten Most Important Questions of the Twentieth Century”. He is the founding editor of the now defunct journals The Barataria Review and Books: A New Orleans Review. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times.

He is the recipient of NEA grants for fiction and Poets in the Schools in Sumpter, S.C., an NEH grant for a presentation on Mardi Gras. He was invited to do a poetry reading at Spoleto Festival in Charleston.

He teaches at Radford University in Radford, Virginia.

He is a native of New Orleans.