​POETRY  

"both prey in the inner city wilds
where gangs yelled taunts"
                                          Photo by Weebly.com                                       

A Rochester, New York Childhood  *
by Dan Liberthson

                      1

​​Eeny meeny miny mo,
Catch a tiger by the toe--
but that’s not what we said.
We said n*****.
 
Then came Andrew, a black kid
smaller than me, the four-eyed Jew
beaten and robbed of my Halloween candy
by his older brothers.
 
Andrew wanted to make amends
and be my friend. I was captured
by the smile that leapt from his face
and flew sweetly to me, without guile.
 
I could scarcely believe it,
for all the other smiles I’d known
had hidden meanings that stabbed
so the teeth stayed behind,
stuck in my mind like stingers.
 
We played together, Andrew and I,
shot each other like good soldiers
but came back to life,
ruled together as kings of the hill,
rode bicycles on motorcycle tours
and saucer sleds down Arctic mountains.
 
If Andrew was a n*****, so was I,
toe clamped in the same trap,
lunging to get away—both prey
in the inner-city wilds
where gangs yelled taunts
and running fast meant getting free
instead of getting beaten.
 
We knew fists black and white,
strangers,' brothers,' fathers,'
raging in our streets and houses--
belts lashing, chains flashing,
and overhead THE BOMB waited.
What use Duck and Cover?
 
On a broad shelf in our garage,
once a hayloft in a barn
(stable odor softened exhaust stink
and dream horse necks arched over),
we shared Luden's Wild Cherry Cough Drops,
pricked our fingers to become blood-brothers,
planned to die together when IT hit--
but grew apart and lost each other.

                      2

​Old man Rory ran our soda shop,
bald head grooved by a thief’s lead pipe--
see the red gully on his white skull?
His worried blue eyes foresaw
the Rochester race riot of ”64
that flexed like a tiger
stalking the future's barren hills.
Our family ran to a suburb--
no future there, no past, no color.
 
Sam Smock, red-headed fatso
from the big corner house,
the first suburban kid I met,
asked “What’s your dad do?”
“He's a doctor,” I said.
“Well, mine’s an architect
and they make more than doctors
so fuck you!”
 
Andrew visited me once--
we brought him in our car.
The garage was never a barn--
no loft to hide in there,
no horse scent in the corners,
so we ran out into the wide yard
where every eye could find us.
As Sam Smock spied from across the way,
all our play leached away,
and left sadness I misunderstood
but Andrew recognized:
blinding pain showed in his eyes
when he saw in mine the doubt
Sam’s sneers left behind.

                             3

​Fifty years later they hunt me down,
that pain and the smile Andrew wore still.
I want to know where he lives,
how he is and does he,
if not killed in one of our wars,
remember me, now gray and shrinking.
Does Andrew still taste wild cherry,
remember the blood we mingled,
carving our names on the old barn’s walls
and throwing, like grenades, perfect snowballs?
 
I send down roots of thought to seek
that small boy blending ever deeper
into hungry soil. Eeny meeny miny mo.
Let me catch you Andrew, or let me go.

​*Author’s Note: Adapted from the poem “Out Comes Y-O-U” in Morning and Begin Again (2012) by Dan Liberthson.
 
*Author’s Note: The asterisks are employed in this piece because of general usage and the policies of OLLI at SF State, and not by the poet’s choice, whose original poem spelled out the word implied by the asterisks. Dan Liberthson invites any readers unfamiliar with or confused by the opening jingle of the poem to contact him directly by email at liberthson@gmail.com, or to read the poem as originally published.

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​Dan Liberthson was born in Rochester, New York and attended Northwestern University and SUNY at Buffalo (PhD, English). He has retired from a career as a medical writer, and lives in San Francisco and Cottage Grove, Oregon. He has published five books of poetry and has published individual poems in anthologies and journals, including The Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, South Coast Poetry Journal, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Chaminade Literary Review and Triggerfish. He was Secretary of the Oregon Poetry Association (2019-2022), and took second place in the William Stafford Memorial Award Poetry Contest (2020) and the Maine Poets Society Contest (2022). He also published The Bluejay Contrivance, a spy novel, and The Golden Spider, a middle-grade fantasy novel. For more information, visit liberthson.com.

Other works in this issue:
Poetry:
​Elegy for Beauregard

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