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.
