The Zingara Project

Tag: The Artemas Poems

  • A Flower Rests by Jerry Wemple

    Daisy rose later in the morning each
    day until she barely rose at all. Ark
    was left to get his own breakfast: peanut
    butter smeared on doughy bread; a pale
    apple in a paper bag to take for school
    lunch. He would shuffle down the slate sidewalks
    parallel to the river street doing his
    best to slow time and the inevitable.
    After school, the return trip home and sometimes
    there deposited on the couch in front of
    a blurred television his mother
    like a monument to a forgotten
    whatever. Sometimes she would cook supper and
    sometimes not. And sometimes the old neighbor
    woman would stop by and say mind if I
    borrow you boy for a while and then sit
    him at her kitchen table and stuff him full
    on greasy hamburger and potatoes
    and sometimes apple pie that was not too bad.

    —

    Jerry Wemple is the author of three poetry collections: You Can See It from Here (winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award), The Civil War in Baltimore, and The Artemas Poems. His poems and essays have been published in numerous journal and anthologies. He teaches in the creative writing program at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.

     

     

  • Night by Jerry Wemple

    Night falls suddenly when the sun declines
    behind these granite hills. The boy sits on
    the river side of the flood wall, his back
    to the town. He smokes a cigarette, counts
    the cars and tractor trucks on the state road
    across the water. Wonders where they’re bound.
    The boy would like a car, some way, any way
    to leave the town, to drive past the farms
    until the hills grow and the woods thicken
    and sit beside the tiny stream that is the start
    of this half-mile wide river. The boy rises,
    heads into town. He walks past the little park,
    a few blocks up Market, enters a tiny hot
    dog restaurant, nods to Old Sam, who started
    the place after the war. Sam knows, fixes
    one with everything, uncaps a blue birch
    from the old dinged metal floor cooler,
    while the boy fingers the lone coin in
    his pocket. Outside the wind rises and shifts.

    —

    Jerry Wemple is the author of three poetry collections: You Can See It from Here (winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award), The Civil War in Baltimore, and The Artemas Poems. His poems and essays have been published in numerous journal and anthologies. He teaches in the creative writing program at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.