3rd Place: <I>"Another New York Poem"</I>

Fat-headed, elf-drunk, cubist heat broomed us into a grocery
where a tatooed Korean built kiwi pyramids,
unpacked pears fat as grapefruit bearing “Product of Australia” stickers,
and re-stocked bins of bagels Latinos boil at H & H,
all the while juking to hip-hop blaring from the corner.
I could invent what we bought that stifling night.

I could make it three a.m., throw in a chess set, a box kite,
Moroccan take-out and some French hand lotion and be found correct.
Here, anything you want whenever and however you want it—
what’s not to love? I love how Panel 363 at Ellis Island
bears my name. We disembarked under cloudless blue,
wind a permeable wall, French fries on the ferry over,

the impossible mass of Manhattan rearing straight out of water.
Three Palestinian boys flung a red ball high as the flag pole,
bumbled giggling, kept failing to catch it. We failed to catch
whole months, though that morning the Swede
allowed under the quota berated the bored Park Service guide
to our scribbling delight. Every nuance, every liquid consonant

made the notebook news. This will not become I said/you said.
I’m bored with that. We make it up anyway. The Korean chucked
his arms to the prefab roar past which his miniscule grandmother stared,
working her chin, long past stunned, though how would I know?
Hip-hop goes right past me. Who needs machined drums?
Millions, apparently. How did I know the boys were Palestinian?

Skin, eyes, hair, the way the Chasidim stared, muttering.
The Swede strode off the boat in 1924. Sixty-nine years on,
hearing aid clinging like a June-bug, he got shunted
to Information. He wanted the Oral History Project
to want his story. You wanted me to want yours,
and I stopped, an old story. I started again. You stopped.

You grew your hair, cut it, grew it. I grew
to think I knew all the music, while you made all
the new you could. Cause-effect is crap. How trace things back
when chromosomes, delusions, breakfasts innocuous as milk
bear stories enough to leave us agape, long past weeping?
Last winter, I hung an etching over the bookcase I built

from wood-scraps the landlord chucked in the barn.
Gnomish Tim Bouffard carved a wish for peace,
and eighteen years on I framed what I see
so much I stop, then wake up, the same way I forget
then look hard at the marsh in low winter light or sweet June.
Tim may be dead. We hugged outside a theater in the Castro

in March, 1979, dead to each other after a few letters,
no matter how heartfelt. I loved him. I won’t try to find him.
Last spring, I drove past Kinzua Dam and Callicoon, New York,
wanted the Hudson on my right, Manhattan on my left,
the pavement unrolling ahead, the filthy exits, Riverside Park,
Haitian au pairs pushing double strollers, bent ancients in overcoats,

gorgeous runners, Chasidim loosed from vast station wagons,
us at our watchful picnic—dense bread, Danish cheese, lox like pink
smoke on the tongue. We found names on the Ellis Island tablets
and made them stories. What disfigurements, what infections
guaranteed refusal! They stared past doctors and guards,
kerchiefs tied under chins, knit caps, billowy trousers,

dresses of rough cloth I imagine just enough to smell
the lye my great-grandfather stopped smelling
as he waited, etching his name in the sill, loving his home
past knowing, conscripted to care for the Kaiser’s horses,
cavalry that ground two cousins into meat. I think I know his calm,
a step past dread. As young as eight, I’d lie in bed while trucks

shook the house as they roared to Philadelphia, making a noise
from which love couldn’t keep us. The wee-hour quiet made it, too,
and my aunts’ talk of years ago, everything fated. Out to dance
and have a pair of highballs each, my parents might never return,
those who made me in a mid-town hotel the spring of 1952,
the pet-names my grandmother gave, the bag-wormed pine,

the pathetic little creek I failed to fish, a catalog of hungers
a hundred miles thick—absurd, gone. I slept. Maxine and John
polished off their monthly roast beef as the band struck up,
deep inside 1961. They fox-trotted and waltzed, even cha-chaed,
but when the band leader hoisted an accordian, my father made
to duck out, played it up, his wife playing along—elbows out, knees flexed,

feet hopping and sliding—C’mon, hon. One polka won’t kill you.

© John Repp

John Repp grew up in Vineland, NJ. He has worked as a retail clerk, gravedigger, egg packer, groundskeeper, storekeeper, export manager, housepainter, freelance editor and writer, and college professor. Repp is the author of Thirst Like This (winner of 1990 Devins Award from the University of Missouri Press) and Things Work Out (Palanquin Press, 1998), and editor of How We Live Now: Contemporary Multicultural Literature (Bedford Books, 1992). An Associate Professor of English at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, he has also served as Visiting Writer in Residence at Carnegie Mellon University.