September Haiku Celebrating the Soon-to-Come Explosions
IN THE PINHEAD SKULL [UNDER TONS OF ORANGE COTTON CANDY]
OF SO-CALLED PRESIDENT DONALD "GRAB 'EM BY THE PUSSY" TRUMP

The Donald can't sleep!"My Pillow" barely functions!Aid Mike Lindell fired

A SHORT FLIGHT FROM MANHATTAN TO MEXICO CITY—ON THE WINGS OF POETRY

The excellent Mexican poet and talented graphic designer, Roberto Mendoza Ayala, became a part-time New Yorker in 2012 while he continued to publish his poetry in books and magazines in Mexico and throughout the Spanish-speaking world. In 2013 he joined local salon gatherings in order to meet local poets here in Manhattan and share his poetry. He remained intimately connected to the Mexico City poetry community (he goes back and forth on business trips at least once a month) and eventually he imagined a way to connect the two groups of poets.

After getting to know those he read with here, Roberto imagined an anthology that would combine the works of poets of the two great cities. He and a small handful of collaborators on both sides of the border gathered the works of twenty-five Mexican and North American poets for the collection entitled “De Neza York a New York”, or “From Neza York to New York” which was published in Mexico City and distributed there and here in May, 2015.

The title speaks for itself. But for those confused by the Neza York reference, the name is that of a colonia, or vast neighborhood, in the sprawling valley that is the Federal District of Mexico City. With close to a million inhabitants (the actual name of the area being Nezahaulcóyotl, after a fifteenth-century Aztec emperor) the area became known to inhabitants as “Neza York”. Mexico City’s airport is there, and because so many businessmen live in or around Nezahaulcóyotl for its close proximity—those who fly back and forth to North America’s most famous city—it took on the whimsical name.

Twenty-five poets—twelve from the States and thirteen from Mexico—each contributed three poems. These were then cross-translated into the two languages, so that the 144-page anthology consists of 150 poems. The Mexican poets are: Roberto Mendoza Ayala, Félix Cardoso, Raúl Casamadrid, Leopoldo González, María Ángeles Juárez Téllez, Victor M. Navarro, Alejandro Reyes Juárez, Iliana Rodríguez, Rolando Rosas Galicia, Arturo Trejo Villafuerte, Aura María Vidales, Guadalupe Vidales and Eduardo Villegas Guevara. From New York City—Mary Askin-Jencsik, Lord Bison, Stephen Bluestone, Hannah Cerasoli, Claire Fitzpatrick, Arthur Gatti, Gordon Gilbert, Robert Givens, Evie Ivy, Rosalind Resnick, Griselda Steiner and Jack Tricarico.

Selected below are excerpts from the anthology:

From Jack Tricarico’s “Wishful Thinking”—

…Does the painting seem like a stain

About to bleed out

Into some kind of semblance

Of something that wants to exist

And can’t find its way into space?...

Roberto Mendoza Ayala’s (entire) “There’ll Never Be Another You”

Of all the fruits possible

you make your nest in my hand

shaped by your sumptuous style.

You are fragrance at the end of a stem

and your flesh slowly yields

in the sugary snake

that bites my tongue.

Having chosen you,

I have left a basket full

of broken promises

Because of current political tensions surrounding Mexican immigrants, an artistic collaboration such as this one couldn’t have come at a better time. Perhaps it’s partially for this reason that the cultural arm of the Mexican government has chosen to launch a special celebration of the publication in late November at Mexico City’s splendiferous Palace of Fine Arts.

The Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes and its literary adjunct, Coordinación Nacional de Literatura, have several events—readings, celebrations and press conferences—planned for the final weeks of November. Around the same time, the Mexican Consulate to the United Nations here in Manhattan, along with The Poetry Society of New York, will be hosting a local celebration to commemorate the anthology’s publication.

BUY MY POETRY BOOK!
Art Gatti's "Mexico--Dust in My Blood"--is a collection of poetry spanning my 50+ years of experiences in our southern neighbor. Just go to Amazon and enter my name and the title--all for under ten buck, including postage!

Like Sandberg's Fog

The smooth gray cat walks in shadows

then passes into light,

padding its way

from invisibility to invisibility.

The memory of you

swims in the glow of its golden eyes,

those embers

soon to grow dark

in the sleeping softness of cat purrs.

Soft fall its eyelids,

softer its breath—

and before I know it,

you are dressed and out the door.

Hamburgers

Flat, fatty patties,

sizz-sizz-sizzling!

The pocket-change burgers of my youth

filled my stomach on nights when I was in a hurry

to leave my family table.

At fifteen, twenty cents each,

they perfumed the inside of Eddie’s forty-one Dodge.

White Castles were mere hors d’oeuvres,

and we piled accusing pyramids,

ziggurats of tiny blue-and-white boxes,

on the midnight stoops of friends

who failed to partake with us

on our nightly beefy forays.

But only Hubie’s Hut on Little Neck Turnpike

had patties that sizzled,

And we sang his song:

“Who stole my heart away?

Who makes me feel so gay?

-- Hubie’s!

He’s a hut!”

Hamburgers today are

flattened meatball excesses

spawned on backyard grills

by fat guys in aprons.

They are not

what I remember

at the back of my tongue:

Yum-yum!

Flat, fatty patties sizz-sizz-sizzling!

The Vision of Childhood

She was the moon-washed, lush Pacific night,

and I wished against nature

to still the crash of waves to hear her every sigh.

In the night of tossed bedclothes

and palm-framed balcony doors flung wide,

her thighs about me, pressing at my heart,

I opened her against the slightest of protests.

“I am black” she whispered from the back of her throat.

That was all.

Glints of wavetop silver shimmered on the wall,

illuminating the brown and pink of her...

where I laid my need and plumbed her own so gently.

Some moments are all there is...

some sensations tell you all.

All that night we told each other these same, simple things.

Ah, but see how the dawn always drives lovers hopelessly

along sad and divergent paths....

Months later

a day came and went

when it could have been again

And the crashing waves-–on hold like stop-motion–-

continued their eternal back-and-forth.

And those footprints on the sand are no more.


[This appears in my "Mexico--Dust in My Blood"]

Shattered Visions

An artist promised art

in return for our rental one summer, while we were away—

a four-walled mural in our bathroom,

her vision of the lower Manhattan panorama

from high up on our roof.

Two winters later, at the end of the final peaceful year of the millennium,

a rampant kitchen blaze brought firemen

from the nearby stations

to save the day.

Containing the small conflagration,

brave men ate smoke, saved us from homelessness.

To be sure there weren’t rogue flames hiding within,

They broke through wallboard here and there.

The men who would answer the final call

ten months down that long road –

who would be shattered then—

themselves shattered

the sketchy images on one wall

of the Twin Towers.

Looking for fire….

And the day came.

And they found fire.

A bike ride away, smoke and flame--

the whole world crumbling,

glued to the tube,

though I could stand in the open air

and behold the funeral pyre

without a voice over.

I didn’t know of the friends yet,

but faced grim knowledge,

remembrances of those I tested,

in rigorous obstacle courses,

who would later graduate the Fire Academy…

which ones might have died there too
beneath the rubble of world peace?

Dawn struck,

confused, disoriented

where to go, what to feel,

I bought a dozen white roses

and mad-staggered

to the firehouse off Houston on Sixth,

stood outside gaping.

It was too early for lists

or to decide on the proper graphics or

know what names to include…to be finally and fatally sure.

Yet there, surrounded by candles and flowers,

a lone firefighter’s portrait

in a simple frame.

I did not see a name,

but I knew the certainty of such memorials.

Noticed the tall young man

leaning against the building,

pensive, hands in pockets, eyes downcast.

A vigil of one.

I asked him,

“Did many men from this station house die?”

“He did,” nodding at the photo.

“He was my brother.”

Great dams have burst at lesser provocation.

I shattered  into spasms of grief,

embraced him, and—before stumbling back through

the poison air of the day—

thrust the roses into his arms.

I had no words.

I just went away.