Ramshackle Review

Al Ortolani:

Two Poems

The Gift

The old man had this car jacked up in the back yard.

I have no idea where he got it, maybe payment

For some black market job with Uncle Frank.

It was a 1935 Dodge without wheels. One day

Out of nowhere he gave it to me.

He said do whatever.

I couldn’t believe my luck,

So I bought some jet-black paint and brushed it

Carefully under the trees. You really had to look

To see the marks. Then I went down to the junkyard

And worked out a deal with Tommy. I lugged home four wheels

And four bald white walls.

One morning the old man

Took a look at what I’d done, and decided that he

Needed the car after all.

So that was that.  But sometimes in the afternoon

When he was asleep after the nightshift,

Mom would help me push it

Out of the driveway into the street. Before supper,

She would follow me back in with a rake, smoothing the gravel

Over the tire tracks. 

 

Performing the High Wire

Before Easter a teacher sent you to the office

where the lady from the Children’s Fund

presented you with a brown package of clothes.

Walking back to the classroom, you hid

the embarrassment of carrying your

New Start in a meat wrapper. You learned early

that a joke at your own expense

put you in command of effacement. As class clown

you assumed a persona, the package like a chair

on the tip of your nose, tight roping an imaginary high wire

to your desk. You swayed above the eyes

of your classmates, teetering

like nothing mattered but the circus.

Al Ortolani is a secondary English teacher in the Kansas City area. His poetry has appeared in the New York Quarterly, The Laurel Review, The Midwest Quarterly, The English Journal and others. His next volume of poetry, Finding the Edge, is due for publication from Woodley Press at Washburn University this spring. Presently, he is a co-editor for The Little Balkans Review, a small regional journal in southeast Kansas.