Steve Peacock

1990, OR A CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE POEM

Took in the Moscow Circus
tenth row at Radio City
with a Puerto Rican girl
and her half-Dominican daughter
afterwards spoiling them
with all-American hot dogs
purchased from a Turkish vendor
in Rockefeller Center
where Nigerian hustlers
of fake Swiss watches
swarmed a wandering horde
of naïve Chinese tourists
gaping at the gold-gilded statue
of the Greek god Prometheus
as we hailed a cab driven
by a blue-turbaned Sikh
who flew us cross town
toward Murphy's Bar & Grill
where Japanese TVs
manufactured in Mexico
featured plastic-faced broadcasters
reporting live on-the-scene
from the Mormon-owned Marriott after
an Egyptian assassin blasted
an Israeli-American rabbi
with a .357 magnum
made in New Hampshire
and while furiously fleeing
struck an old gent named Irving
commandeered a taxi
from Garcia the cabbie
reciprocated shots
with Postal Officer Acosta
right outside the building
where I first encountered
the Puerto Rican girl
earlier in the year.


Steve reads "1990...":



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Steve confesses: "Five years as a 'hotel detective' of the Helmsley Palace hotel in Manhattan during the late 80s-early 90s sparked the ideas that generated this poem; much of "1990..." is based on both actual and generalized events that took place around me during that tumultuous time in New York City history."

STEVE PEACOCK is a writer, actor, and educator who was born in the Bronx and now lives in New Jersey. An excerpt from his memoir-in-progress, "Play Dead, Roll Over," was a finalist in Creative Nonfiction magazine's "Anger & Revenge" contest in 2011. Gravel: A Literary Journal in 2013 published a similar version of that excerpt. A longer version is forthcoming in Crime Factory. His poetry has appeared in Monkeybicycle, Edison Literary Review, InDigest, The Idiom, and South Jersey Underground.