Poetry in America

Westmoreland

48 westMorelanD By a railroad spur and some charred coke ovens, four skating ponds in a row we called First Pond, Second Pond, Third Pond, and Fourth, never noticing those failures of imagination. Ovens still glowed like holes to hell along back roads by Hunker. Memorial Day meant nothing, Independence Day meant nothing, but Labor Day was fireworks, parades, a firemen’s fair with bingo tents and boxing under lights. Septembers, hills around Bushy Run and Brush Creek surrendered their metal for no one’s work: goldenrod and iron weed more brilliant than the bruised ore pellets we gleaned along the tracks for our slingshots. Jewel weed thrived along Stink Crik, water rusted in ponds of runoff, and in parking lots, slag chips were flamingo feathers. The Del Bene brothers rode to fires hanging off the fire truck, their bloody butcher aprons flapping; brides rode to their wedding receptions clinging to that truck, veils trailing smoke tongues. Once, volunteer firemen tried to blow fog off the field for homecoming. We fought in the end zone for splinters of goal post, the one true cross. Band members were faggots, thespians were faggots, brains hid in the library during Activity Period. At the bus stop, we spit hawkers onto one spot and kicked a snot puck on the ice. At the bus stop, Johnnie Johnson said, Blow me, and I said, Bare it, like all the kids, but when he pulled out his little dick, I hid my eyes. Nights were train cry 49 and rumble, rear of house fire, fear of trench-coated men opening a car trunk stuffed with Yablonsky bodies, or teamsters dropping cement blocks onto the turnpike. At the Monroeville Sheraton men got shot. Saturday morning on the radio, sweet polkas went out for birthdays, anniversaries, first holy communions. Saturday afternoon at Norwin Public Library, a penis jabbed from a gap in the stacks. I slammed my books, moved to Periodicals, but it was there when I got back. When I marched back and tried to stare the creep down, he was just an ordinary man, a dentist or someone’s dad, standing in the shelves. Was it much worse than any place we could have grown up? Or, like all the Hawthorne they forced us to read in 11th grade, was Westmoreland County wasted on us, so young, all we could learn was to hate it? ...