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Video: “Mauches” by Angele Ellis
Mauches
in memory of my grandmother, “Josie” Ventiquattro
this is what your father told you
to ask for at the company store
mauches, the cracked English word
(one of the few he ever knew)
paired with the gesture of striking
live match to dead cigarette
mauches, mauches, mauches
you repeated to yourself, skirting
the tobacco-colored street
the leafless trees stinking of sulfur
the smokestack at your back
a cigar with a poisoned plume
mauches, you asked the man
in the apron dark with stains
he refused to understand you, refused
the buffalo nickel burning your palm
filthy wops need to learn to talk
and you knew one more word, slapping
your hot face all the way home, each
slap a lit match against your skin
like the cross they set ablaze one night
on the hill above your tenement, terrifying
as a man bursting into flame from rage
I never learned la bella lingua except
to write you one letter in schoolgirl Italian
from college, a letter you loved so much
it fell into sharp creases like the paper
used to roll a poor man’s cigarette—
I learned to burn at protest marches, heart
incandescent as a Buddhist monk alight—
I learned to make our stepmother tongue,
barbed like the wire at our borders,
say the things you never could never forget
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
—from Spared by Angele Ellis (A Main Street Rag Editor’s Choice Chapbook). Copyright Angele Ellis
Angele Ellis, the granddaughter of immigrants from Lebanon and southern Italy, is the author of four books and a longtime activist. She lives in the Friendship neighborhood of Pittsburgh.
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good Boym in your grand tongue, meaning good poem in standard english..
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Thanks, Saleh. I agree!
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Such a strong, evocative poem– how some memories are, indeed, like struck sulfur “mauches” in our brains. And something –the tone maybe? — reminded me of immensely missed and so dear Gerald Stern, a Pittsburgh poet extraordinaire. When I read Angela Ellis’ poem, I remembered one of Gerald’s last lines in “The Dancing”, a fabulous poem I’ll never forget:
“in—1945— / in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home /of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away /from the other dancing in Poland and Germany—/oh God of mercy, oh wild God.”
…and now aren’t we today 5,000 miles away and facing the same horrors with the wars in Ukraine and Gaza?
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Yes! Fellow Pittsburgher Gerald Stern is in the background of this poem singing of the immigrants living in the hills and valleys of the Monongahela River.
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Extraordinary. Powerful stuff.
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In Pittsburgh, there is still a strong presence of immigrant ancestors in the neighborhoods.
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