Michael Simms: Last Testaments
at dawn you’ll arrive
having thrown your luggage in the River Styx
and we’ll drink from the silver cup of day
Joseph Bathanti: Maz’s Homer
Sister Ann Francis, my teacher, whom I do not like at all, though she will not prove the worst of them, slips us word that Sister Geralda, the ferocious school principal, who teaches eighth grade, has granted amnesty for the last ten minutes of the school day. We are to hurry home to witness the climax of the World Series.
Frank Lehner: Mrs. Nussbaum’s Monkey
Pops never said much, but there he was in his T-shirt and loose boxers telling Jessers about the Easter Tuesday night he lost his mother and taking the streetcar to go to work because there was nothing to do until the next day, and the plant owner only gave two days off for deaths.
Gary Fincke: Schmaltz
My mother
Said we could shimmy it off in no time,
Doing the Twist and the Mashed Potato,
The dances of the slim who’d never heard
Of real schmaltz and the terrible success
Of learning place
Kristofer Collins: Pineapple Eddie (three poems)
This is not the color
if justice is what we expect. I feel
God’s thumb pushing down our heads
like dull tacks into this offended earth.
Mike Vargo: System Failure, from the Bronze Age to the Age of Trump
Did a long-ago collapse of civilizations portend our future?
Ed Simon: The Pennsylvanian Period
There must be stones in Frick Park
that no human hand has ever touched.
The stratified Conemaugh, of Ames
limestone, sandstone, shale, and
Duquesne coal.
Joseph Bathanti: High Mass
Winter Sundays,
when my father was on strike from steel,
he and my mother woke late,
then rose and prepared for high mass at Saints Peter and Paul.
Joseph Bathanti: Steady Daylight
Today in Heaven,
my father turned 105.
Finally working steady daylight
James Laughlin: Easter in Pittsburgh
the telephone rang it
was Mr. Shupstead at the
mill they had had to use
tear gas father made a
special prayer right a-
way for God’s protection
Video: “Mauches” by Angele Ellis
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
Michael Simms: Snow
her father sitting alone in his underwear
having stripped off his blackened clothes
and leaving them on the back porch,
white skin of his legs, black dust on his face
Yesterday’s Tomorrow: Street Art in Pittsburgh
Although Pittsburgh is home to a number of major museums and art galleries, the region’s streets often tempt residents to create their own art.
Michael Simms: The northern forests are burning
Here, 500 miles away
Smoke hangs over our valley
