[Realpoetik] Mark Dow

[RealPoetik Magazine]

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* Mondongo is Not a Soup*

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*

            On the D train to Coney Island, a little girl whose black patent
leather shoes with heart-shaped buckles on them do not reach the floor
sneezes on her green helium-filled balloon.  She stares at it, shakes it,
then finds the corner of the coat she's wearing and wipes the balloon.  Then
she wipes it again, with her hand.  Then she rests her chin on it.  Her
father reads aloud to her mother from *Your First Year in Network Marketing*
:  "Here's a typical scenario," and reaches up to tap away the balloon,
which is now touching his head.  The girl is still holding the attached
strand of green ribbon.  He reads, "There are three kinds of apples -- the
red, the green, and the rotten."  He has a New York Lottery gym bag on his
lap.

            At La Taza de Oro on 8th Avenue near 15th Street, there is a
rotary pay phone near the entrance.  The action in the dial is liquid,
hydraulic, leisurely, and greasy to the touch.  At the far end of the
counter, a big man, in charge, stands near the kitchen entrance and uses an
ordinary table knife to cut -- to push, really -- bite-size pieces of
under-ripe avocado onto one bed of lettuce at a time.  Then he slices a
white onion and puts one slice, separating its concentric rings without
breaking them apart, on top of each avocado mound, and puts each plate into
the refrigerator case.  Across the counter, a young waiter mutters to
himself, then says aloud that he ordered "dos sopas de mondongo" and where
are they?  The older man corrects him:  "*Dos mondongo: *mondongo no es una
sopa."

            At Mooney's Bar on Flatbush, a black man asks if I'm from "the
colonies."  Then he asks if I smoke marijuana and adds, "I'm not a cop.  I'm
a construction worker."  He offers to let me feel his hands.  The pear
blossoms in the spring sunshine glow, seemingly bursting with fat.  A closer
look and the bubbles are imperfect hemispheric constellations of 8-10 small
flowers each.  An even closer look and the tiny pistils are purple.  On 7th
Avenue in Park Slope, a woman walks with a yellow umbrella open.  Three
women from the colonies watch her.

            "Maybe she knows something we don't."

            "Maybe she forget. Maybe where she comin' from it's rainin'."

            At the 23rd Street station on the 1/9 line, downtown side, a
young white woman with an English accent says to the man in the token booth:
"You *do* have the power to do something about it," and repeatedly calls him
"arsehole."  After passing through the turnstile, she sits on a bench with
her face in her hands and cries. At the 28th Street station on the N/R line,
downtown side, a middle-aged brown-skinned man glares at the man in the
token booth and yells, making a trilling sound in his throat,  "You!
BAAAAAA!  Fucking goat!"

            Two men, one pushing, one pulling, move a jet-ski chassis down
the sidewalk and around the corner of Carroll and 4th Avenue, leaving a
white, chalk-like, curved, double line.  An eighteen-wheeler flatbed takes a
turn fast, bouncing its cargo of engine blocks secured atop a bed of tires.
Two girls, one holding a folded slice of pizza, approach portable toilets,
one of which is padlocked, in Prospect Park.  Thirteen monosyllables:

            "I went in there once and they trapped me in there."

            "I won't."




*Mark Dow*'s poems and prose have appeared in *Mudlark, Nthposition,
Fascicle, Boston Review, LIT, Conjunctions, Green Integer
Review*(translations from Buenos Aires).  He also wrote a book called
*American Gulag: Inside US Immigration Prisons* (California 2004).


~

Frequent www.realpoetik.blogspot.com for poems;
www.realpoetikblog.blogspot.com for news!
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