This week we’re thrilled to publish a new poem by Gregory Fraser. Fraser is the author of two poetry collections, Strange Pietà (Texas Tech, 2003) and Answering the Ruins (Northwestern, 2009). He is also the co-author, with Chad Davidson, of the workshop textbook Writing Poetry: Creative and Critical Approaches (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008) and the composition textbook Analyze Anything: A Guide to Critical Reading and Writing (Continuum, 2012). His poetry has appeared in journals including the Paris Review, the Southern Review, the Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares. The recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fraser serves as associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of West Georgia.
The Great Northeast
—for Blesz and Delicious
If they still botch grammar in Northeast Philly,
Lord, let’s leave it that way, at least on the corner
where Givens Market used to squat on its thumb.
The door sign lacked possessive punctuation
but inside offered the musks of garlic and armpits,
near-cost prices on powdered milk, deviled ham.
Eight to eight, that grocery stared from thick
glass blocks—6 x 6 inch cubes frozen by fire—
at the intersection of Ella and East Courtland,
at white kids and black, almost-innocent indigence
and Mayor Rizzos thugs. Twelve and scrawny
as any excuse, I would palm an apple in Produce,
then hurry home to sprawl in my parents bed
and watch the Broad Street Bullies bloody ice
on a black-and-white Sylvania hardly larger
than lunch—just as I had opened wide and let
the tube feed Viet Nam, toy-sized soldiers
crawling brush, for I was born in blood
and bred in blood, like you and all the rest,
for my second brother had spread already
the flaps of mother’s womb, and scrambled
wide-eyed, wounded, from that tent. Mrs. Given
lisped, her husband bore on his back a lump
as large as the acorn squash that never sold,
and while I shelved and bagged after school, buck
an hour—their surrogate boy, sweet un-son, given
to unctuousness and theft—the radio spilled “Baby,
how long / will you keep me in the penalty box?”
It was 1975, the Cup stayed home, and Number 8
kept crooning. Oh, it strikes me now my father,
whose take-home every month went straight to bankers,
might have sung that very chorus, only “Baby”
would stand for men in worsted suits—as in,
“Oh, yeah, Baby, like that, do me like that,
till I drink myself stupid and cough up blood.”
This, you understand, was long before I’d read
anything but “The Raven” and “The Road Not Taken,”
taught by nuns, but Sweet Son of Man, I see it today,
if a hockey enforcer like Dave “The Hammer” Schultz
could belt out public song, why then couldn’t I,
at least from the smooth white rink of a page?
And if the moon looked like a tooth knocked clean
from the mouth of Billy Penn, if my soft employers
survived the Hat-Trick Reich, were given
a second chance to sniff cantaloupes for ripeness,
what could it matter to leave off an apostrophe
that states, “I own this, this is mine”? Better to let
the years keep dipping themselves in honey and fire,
better to put down something—anything—in truth
and barely claim it. Even if it’s a fist to the lip
of Denis Potvin, or a stores hand-lettered door sign.
Why else did the axe-faced glaciers open
envelopes of stone? So we could read
times invitation—right?—and R.S.V.P
with an ardent “Yes, I shall attend.”
Why else would Mrs. Given press a twenty
to my palm each Christmas, a holiday
she couldn’t bend for? It’s no wonder they call it
The Great Northeast. No wonder at all.
Here, old neighborhood. I spit this on ice for you.
