CORA

A siren startles her. Police? Fire?
Waking up from sleep Cora thinks:
“It’s hard. It’s hard.”
Life is hard. Dealing with each day
is hard. And it’s a long wait for
anything to celebrate. “God’s will
be done.” Cora stares at the ceiling.
It is cold in the room. She feels a
fever coming on.

Pots and pans clutter the stove, plates,
bowls, glasses from breakfast need to
be dealt with. Lyle, Whitney, Mickey are
off to school with bagged lunches. Cora fixes
the beds, showers, dresses,. Before she leaves
for work she pays the bills, orders drug store
necessities, pharmaceuticals.
She reflects that if women, like men, took life as
it comes nothing would get done.

“I believe in God! I believe in God! I believe
in God!” Cora sobs. Her fever is in full blaze.
She tries to make it through the workday.
sweating, scrubbing, scraping, polishing.
She has to or she won’t get paid. Plus they
won’t let her back unless she gets a doctor’s
note saying she was truly sick and not slacking.
She couldn’t afford that. A doctor’s bill was
twice as much as her daily paycheck.

Wide-eyed the children watch Cora pop the
corn and hang the streamers, set out cookies
and cakes with multi-colors.
“Whose birthday, Mama?” Lyle wants to know.
“No one’s, child.” Cora smiles. “The day
got itself done and I thought we’d have some
fun. I bought us some new cartoons at the
Nickelodeon.”

• 

“The Magic City”

The steel mills of Gary Indiana, the narrow
crowded streets, the grit, grime, ash heaps,
crime, the money! – my uncle John was a
plant foreman. I moved in with him and my
aunt Ann when I graduated high school in
Chicago.
You couldn’t beat the pay at the steel mills.
They paid twice as much as any factory I would
have worked in Chi-town and the benefits were
just as good.
My cousin Jerry, also just out of school, got
hired the same day. With overtime, bonus
checks, double time for working holidays,
we were making as much as doctors (almost.)
We got a bachelor’s pad, new cars, snazzy
threads, Talk about the American Dream!
We were unskilled Jet Setters (or nearly).
Lurking within that dream, however, was an
American nightmare, the Vietnam war.
The draft was introduced and Jerry and I
were taken right away. Everyone was sent
to the war, unless they could dodge it in
college or join the peace corps.
The mills were getting stripped of their young
workers. Every plant was.
Fifty thousand plus died in the conflict.
Another hundred thousand and more were
wounded, many permanently.
Our dreams didn’t last long.
“The Magic City” fell apart too. When we
got out of the service there were no jobs for
us. We had hired on to a work force of thirty
thousand. Due to globalization, and outdated
machinery the mills shrank exponentially.
Less than six thousand people work there now.
Work disappeared in Indiana and dreams died,
same as in the rest of the country.

• 

FULL MOON, LOONEY TUNES
Only artists or hermits or monks choose
poverty, any other social theory is baloney.
Wine, women and song cost little; studio
space next to nothing if you live in a
ghetto. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and
what’s her face works for a long time, at
least when you are in your prime.
An artist, poet or painter, wants to work
as little as possible at some job that takes
them away from their pen or easel.

“So there’s that 47%,” Mitt Romney whined,
“that we can forget. They will vote for Obama
and collect their gifts.”
“There are givers and the takers – those
who contribute and those who mooch,”
Paul Ryan stared steely eyed at the press.
“If you’re poor or out of work it’s your
own fault.” Rush, the bus, Limbo roared.

Moochers, takers, goldbricks, sure fits
artists. But I don’t think it applies to the
poor or anyone who’s out of work or ever
has been. I suppose there’s always been
junkies, and winos, and panhandlers on the
streets, lost souls with mental problems and
those who are, OK, just plain lazy. It can’t
be many. But these politicians and that radio
guy somehow forget we just got out of the
Great Recession and what’s available are
still slim pickings, and I can’t see how it
applies to homeless families or those doomed
to meager lives in the ghettos and hollows,
and slums across the nation through
misfortune.

That 47% has grown. Half of the country lives
in or near poverty now. The Affordable Care
Act has added 6 million to the ranks of the
insured. 45 million to go. But the
Republican governors refuse to let their
constituents get the expanded Medicaid,
so that won’t happen.

There was only one artist at the Boston
Center for the Arts who actually got on
disability. Helen the heavenly. Many tried.
They got their inspiration from a character
by Thomas Pynchon. To prove that he was
crazy, so he could collect government checks,
he would jump, every year, through the plate
glass window of a department store.
Whatever antics my friends pulled didn’t
work. The government techs said “Nix.”
Helen was a poet, much published. She wrote
like Sylvia Plath on acid. She was mad as a
Hatter, as beautiful as a movie star. Once
each summer, on a full moon night, she would
wear her platinum hair in tiers, don flashy
costume jewelry, wear a black satin gown and
walk barefoot through the ghetto. No one
could stop her. The police would find her in
the morning, raped and beaten. They would
file a report. Helen would give it to her social
worker. “I couldn’t help myself.” She would
say through tears.
We all knew she set the whole thing up
with her gangsta lover.

• 

SHADOWS
We wander the ghost lanes of
our lost souls, coat collars turned
up against the blistering cold.
There is nothing left to gamble.
All bets were off, for us, a long
time ago. Time is all that’s left,
It’s the kind one serves like a
prison sentence.
We huddle beside the Mission,
smoke caged cigarettes, wait for
it to open: prayer, meal, lights out
at ten, spectral dreams with
phantom men.
Prayer? What is there to pray for?
Tomorrow we will rise slowly,
as from a graveyard like dead men,
and haunt the world again.

DEAD BOLT
Key in the wrong door, maybe it will open
to something better?
I hear two doors close behind the locked one
The sound is final, my visit done.
I grew up near a race track, horses, dogs.
All the races were fixed.
There was a sign staked near the entrance
someone hammered into the ground.
“Jesus Finds The Lost.”
Lost bets I wondered?
No, the lost find Jesus, I concluded.
Not as good as scoring money but they
have to win something.
I’ll end this poem with a conversation
with a homeless person.
“Are you lost?” I ask him.
“I’m homeless. Can you spare some
change?”
“Maybe. I’m writing a poem. So far
it has no meaning. I was hoping you could
give it some.”
“You want meaning from a bum?”
“I’ll take it from anyone.”
“You need the right key to open the right
door. If you never find that key you’ll
be locked out forever.”
I gave him some change anyway.

•