We are pleased to present our first Poet to Notice: Tom Pescatore

We hope you enjoy these three poems as much as we did.

Round 3

Finished edits today,

baked chicken with potatoes

on 400 degrees and the whole

place smelled like rosemary, it’s

70 outside and sunny, tomorrow

I’ll be in the archives reading

Revolutionary War pension files,

it’ll be raining like it always does,

I’m in DC again, scrawling in red and green

ink, I’ve got all these sketches tucked

away in my journal, part of me wants to

post them here, but I can’t bring myself—

I watch the cleaning crew outside my window

5 stories below…they’re speaking Spanish

and I don’t get it, I don’t get

much—

~~~

Southern Metro Cookin’

 They had us in a fish fry

like sardines sweating those

remaining hours away before

a hand grabs and pulls them

toward God, like the can with

the curled up top that looks like

some satanic soda pop,

and the girls were grinding their

teeth all smiles, a group sang happy

birthday outside Arlington cemetery

which I found kinda funny

in way, I guessed for all the oil lost

and we boiled crispy and golden

until we hit the end of the line

which was just two slices

of white bread and a side of slaw

away from the Pentagon.

~~~~

Memories

Remember when I sat on that

couch in Hyattesville, MD, I all

but owned the first floor and the

shower in the corner past the kitchen

with its black ants crawling up the

wall and getting wet by the hanging

shower head—crawling on my clothes,

sliding into the sink–those fucking ants,

I couldn’t save them and they

followed me into that small green

tiled foggy cell;

Remember how I’d watch them

uneasily while undressing, like the slugs

slithering across my kitchen floor in

dead-winter, thinking, “What the fuck am

I doing here?”

~~~~

Tom Pescatore grew up outside Philadelphia dreaming of the endless road ahead, carrying the idea of the fabled American West in his heart. His work has been published in literary magazines both nationally and internationally but he’d be just as happy having them carved on the side of the Walt Whitman bridge or the sidewalks of Philadelphia’s old Skid Row.