Joe Dolce: Two Poems

Broad Arrow Café

Broad Arrow Café was busy that day,

the tables were arranged tightly to heel—

two minutes of terrible shadow play.

 

A Colt AR-15 Carbine at bay,

Martin Bryant went in and ate a meal.

Broad Arrow Café was busy that day.

 

That’s not funny, someone heard someone say,

not realising the shots were too real,

two minutes of terrible shadow play.

 

A reenactment, or Port Arthur play?

Customers trapped, with no place to conceal,

Broad Arrow Café was busy that day.

 

Twenty-nine rounds fired in the café,

ten people wounded and twelve people killed,

two minutes of terrible shadow play.

 

Families could not comprehend the affray,

crouched in corners, they covered and kneeled.

Broad Arrow Café was busy that day,

two minutes of terrible shadow play.

Joe Dolce

 

Grandma’s Basement Kitchen

was where she fried

breaded smelt and perch,

in hot oil, stored cannings,

freshly lettuced the garden snails, in boxes,

next to the brown iron-doored

coal furnace, its silver octopus vents

ascending through the 2×4’d ceiling.

The coal room was a cold room

stacked with black chunks shoveled

from street-level down the metal chute.

One time, I pinned my thumb

in a furnace door-slam, the nail

turned coal-black blue and fell off;

stepped on a wrong-side-up nailed board,

rushed to Emergency, for a lockjaw shot,

my mother afraid my face would freeze up.

Another time, three or four years old,

I staggered up basement stairs,

sneaking under grownups,

having drunk what remained,

in empty beer bottles, lifted

out of partitioned cardboard cases,

just drops, not much, but enough

to wet my little brain.

Grandma baked loaves,

fed extended family, at Sunday feasts,

around the oval upstairs dining-room table,

extensions inserted, only surfacing, from below,

to serve endless dishes; never to eat with us.

The basement kitchen was where

real work was done, where smells stayed put.

I remember many days down

worn dark flower-carpeted stairs, descending

into the hold of an old Calabrian ship,

pitch-black, blind, sailing back into the past,

until the bulb-switch was hit,

near the screen door, the plastic-covered

embroidered tablecloth lighting up,

as I stepped off the bottom plank,

somewhere in Italy. 

Here aproned women, with sharp kitchen knives,

took me dandelion-digging,

in nearby yellow-flowered fields,

by Grand River—where Ordinary people

saw weeds, a practiced forefinger,

under a blade, thumb on top, scooped

young plants, out of dirt, into large apron pockets,

back in basement country, washed and tossed

in olive oil and salt, a small leaf salad,

like nothing I’ve ever tasted since.

The musty downstairs storeroom was a doorway

to rows of red, yellow, orange peppers,

in embossed glass jars, with golden screw tops.

Grandma, her sisters, my mother,

ritually gathered, in the depths,

to bottle fresh-picked Romas.

Scored and parboiled briefly, skins

split and loosened, finger-squeezed off,

skinless fruit was crammed into just-sterilized glass,

lidded and lowered into boiling water,

killing bad things.

Stacked on wooden shelves, in perfect symmetry,

her cold room was an eighteenth century apothecary,

each jar wrapped in hand-written labels.

Something mystical about it all. Combinations,

of this and that, if you knew the spells,

could produce eating magic.

 

When grandma got too old to conjure,

her vast tribe extending outward,

into circles too wide to intersect,

big Sunday gatherings stopped.

The basement kitchen was mostly quiet.

Climbing stairs became hard on blue-veined legs.

My father often drove her over to our house for family.

My younger sister grew up knowing only

my mother’s cooking, just one generation back.

She hadn’t been born yet, when her older brother

was being fed, and storied,

from a much older world.

Joe Dolce