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Brynn Champney Jun 2010
A baby from Burundi sits next to me today.
He coos and drinks and swallows his mother’s milk.
His father speaks Swahili. Smiles, tells me that his last son
Is going to grow old in Rochester, NY,
Where I sit in a white-walled waiting room, watching
Mothers drag their babies by the armpits to be weighed.

A boy with braided beads holds up four fingers and tells me he is five.
He is too skinny. His pants are sagging and his iron is low.
His mother takes his vegetable checks, stuffs them into the back pocket of her jeans.
What the little **** needs is two percent milk, she says,
Her gold hoops fluttering.

Her son struggles with the small wooden chair he is carrying.
It drags along the carpet, hitting the high spots, and his tiny biceps flinch.
He sits, facing me, while a name is called. And another.
Another woman’s son hands me a book and waits.
He is watching my face and I watch his mother kiss her boyfriend in the first row seats.
He tucks his chin to his chest when I ask his name. Whispers, tells me Jayden.

First page. What color is Elmo, Jayden?
Shoulders shrugging. His lower lip, puckered out and innocent.
What color is he, Jayden?

The color of Jayden’s skin slaps me across the heart when he says he doesn’t know.
He was born in Rochester, NY,
With trash bags and Burger King wrappers wrapped around the fence
That separates his house from the street on which he will grow old
Too soon.
He starts kindergarten in the fall and I tell him Elmo is red, like his t-shirt.
Like his mother’s fingernails.
Like the tomatoes and bell peppers and beets he has never seen.

A girl who went to my High School carries in her youngest child
Who is old enough to walk, but wobbles.
She calls her daughter “thunder-thighs” instead of Jazmyne
And strips off her shoes. Her belt. Her gold bracelets.
The scale says Jazmyne is too heavy for food assistance.
The state says her mother isn’t poor enough for welfare.
The girl I used to know leaves without her daughter’s shoes or the food checks she came for.

In conversations of pretension
We talk about first and third world.
Pretend that America is the land of second chances
Where a baby from Burundi can grow old in cashmere sweaters,
Even when his parents couldn’t pay.

The father who speaks Swahili looks at his shiny watch and his family’s vegetable checks.
Smiles. Tells me his last son is going to grow old and full
In Rochester, NY.
1st place, University of Rochester Medical Center's Creative Excellence Contest (2008)
Nat Lipstadt Jun 2018
the earth is curved - sure y’all knew that.  
but to get to the Northwest,
Interstate 84
ain’t le route plus directe

nope curve north to Ontario,
wave to Bex as I cross over
London and Toronto, also can’t recall
which poet from Rochester hails,
or did they shuffle off to Buffalo?

Crossing Erie, Huron, and Michigan Great Lakes all,
brings to mind
my mother’s birthplace,
Last of the Mohicans,
and the three years I did in the Cleveland Penitentiary,
where sun was illegal and baseball was a pretend play
of cowboys and Indians
but by god, it made me
the penitent fella I am today

Look skyward to Montreal,
yes, there he is, the Leo Priest,
the baffled king,
blessing this poetic meet ‘n greet trip
with a smiling unsurprising
hallelujah

Apparently some US citizens still can traverse O Canada,
even if one forgot their passports,
and are not PNG’s (Persons Not so GREAT)

over Minneapolis shed a tear for Diane,
a poet- gone-missing, and wonder if you reader come from
St. Cloud, Fargo or Duluth, Bismarck or Aberdeen,
surely they still speak poetic English there
in a twangy metering methodology  - well, message me asap

wow there really is a Saskatoon!

the pilot asks us to lean left in our seats
to help turn the plane
so we go to Portland and not to Vancouver...
me thinks he might be a touch Rockie Mountain High,
considering we are at 30 thousand something Imperial,
as he walks the main cabin with an oxygen mask and a
huuuuuge grin

see the distant Cascades
through a crack in the shuttered windows,
must be close to “the coast”
(as if, harrumph, there were but one)

ah, words in the clouds, ripe for the plucking
must be getting close to Oregon,
where poets grow on trees, woody words like ****,
and log-float poems down the Columbia to the sea

gonna drink me some poets
under the table cause this
trip I ain’t no driving and I am already
“flying” ‘n scribing and arriving
on a high tide and a good wind
Jim Hill Mar 2011
We waded knee deep in the puddles
of vacant lots when the flood filled
our gutters to the brim.

When the rain died down and the water pulled
itself from the streets we watched the rainbow
of oil swirl around our ankles,

walked the wooden footbridge that broke
apart under the weight of our feet,
the water-logged wood rot

splitting while rusted nails slid
out of place. We followed the streams
back to the plaza, back to fake IDs

and the ash-stained tobacco shop.
We found ourselves under flickering
lights, leaning against the rusted

siding of the family market, faces hidden
in a mask of smoke. We got lost
in the electric hum of the laundromat's cyclic drone.

They paved over it all -- covered freckled
skin with cloth and hot tar,
crushed vacant houses like hollow skulls,

ignited neon lights and street lamps,
strip malls and drugs stores
that burn holes into old hiding places.

They still try to sift through shattered glass,
silence the hiss of the popped bike tire,
wipe away the blood flower that blooms

from my scabbed knee.
Joseph Zenieh Aug 2018
ROCHESTER'S CALL FOR JANE
Jane, my Jane, l need your love; please, come to me.
I have lost my hand and sight; come make me see.
I feel that l need you much; my heart calls you.
Don't neglect my urgent call; come, be my view.

I have lost all that l have, but l don't care.
I feel a great surge in heart to touch your hair.
Come, l want to press you hard to my faint chest
and give you my loving heart, what's for me left.

I can't keep my heart, that cradles your love, safe.
I wish to entrust this love ere l get off.
It's my treasure in my life, and all l've got.
Please, come soon. You are my hope ere l depart.

I have seen a lot, but you have got the touch
that could enslave all my thoughts and my heart catch.
Come let me enfold your heart to sing the tune
that my heart has sung for long; please, Jane, come soon.
BY JOSEPH ZENIEH
____________
Poets coming into Rochester,
Welcome to the perfect poetic city!
We're dark in November,
Blinding in May.
Sleepy streets,
Winding roads.
Dinner at a diner,
Welcome to your second home, it's a winner's city for sure.
If you ever come to Rochester I suggest you come in the summer or fall. Stay up late and wake up early, eat at the diners (not the chain ones), visit the pier down at Seabreeze, and make sure to get an air bnb so you can have a backyard fire late into the night.
courtney Oct 2015
Strings attach our beings;
Love, omnipresent,
unites forest with fire.

(C) 4/10/15
Courtney L
10w poem
Alice Butler Nov 2013
There's a funny sort of emptiness
that passes over me
as I walk past the paperback erotica that tuck themselves away
in the shelves of the local grocery store in places that are
simultaneously completely out in the open yet completely ignored
looking, as I do, with mock casual interest
and unfeigned disdain.
Who are these intended for, really?
Are they for the snuggly-wuggly, *****, cozy-woozy, wishy-washy and warm family of four
comparing chicken nugget prices and
weighing the health benefits of
vegetable medley versus succotash?
Or are they for the uni flatmates
walking huddled together for warmth or protection or both,
seeing as they're wearing only sandals and denim shorts
and this is the first time
they've been grocery shopping without mum,
that giggle loudly together to mask how homesick they really are
while they compare the calories in
Campbell's versus Progresso.
They went with Progresso if you were wondering.
Or are they meant for those who are cooking for one?
For those who have no need to compare prices
or calories
out loud.
For those who are well acquainted
with the old, familiar tiled aisles
as they have no one to take out to dinner.
Is this where they are to find company?
Betwixt the pages of a badly penned,
lighter than marshmallows,
more shallow than the kiddie pool,
more transparent than Casper,
not-good-enough-to-be-******-compost
"literary" garbage?
Is this -assumed- female
supposed to curl up with one of these slabs of drivel
and feel **** and aroused
in her baggy sweats and ill-fitting hoodie
after she ate a microwaveable chicken *** pie all by her lonesome?
As a single girl who often cooks for one,
I am offended by this.
Personally,
I think Lestat is ten times sexier than Edward,
Salai is way cuter than Fabio,
and Christian Grey couldn't S Mr. Rochester's D.
What I'm saying is-
Grocery Stores.
YOU are the primary reason for this pathetic f-ckery.
Everything else in the store can be compared for quality.
So why not apply that same knowledge
to the book arena.
Signed,
A Concerned Shopper
p.s. Please extend the validity date on the chicken *** pie coupon. Thank you!
Seriously considering sending this to my local grocery store.
John F McCullagh Oct 2013
The Fox sisters of Rochester
lived in a haunted house.
A spirit there was stirring
That was probably not a mouse.
Spirits rapped upon the walls
and on the window panes.
The sisters Fox would rap right back
according to their claims.

The Foxes were sensations,
The Belles of Halloween
Their Séances well attended
By the credulous, T’would seem.
Spirit fever gripped the land
With rapping on a table
(Maggie Fox was double jointed
And the whole thing was a fable.)

It’s hard to sell your real estate
when it’s a haunted home.
But when spooks rap, rap right back
You’ll never be alone.
The Fox sisters of Rochester, NY were the sensations of the spiritualism movement in the 1870's
AF Oct 2021
i hope you see my face
in the clouds one day,
maybe i'm gone
and you're still there.

— The End —