Charles Rammelkamp

A DAUGHTER REMEMBERS HER FATHER

I always liked the Joe Mantegna character in Levinson’s Liberty Heights.
That’s exactly how my dad was, a family man.
Only, he didn’t go quietly to federal prison, like in the movie,
but jumped the $80,000 bail, fled to Montreal,
then lived his life out in Tel Aviv.

For years the FBI never had a clue
what became of “The Lord,” as my dad was called,
a slick dresser in his tailor-made suits:
Julius Salsbury cut a real aristocratic figure.
Dad even insisted I wear dresses to school, a little lady.
He ran his gambling operation out of the Oasis Cabaret
on The Block, Baltimore’s red-light district,
even though we lived near the Pimlico racetrack.
Daddy loved the horse races!

The FBI was always locking him up.
I remember visiting him at the Jessup prison
when I was just a child.
But fifteen years behind bars? No way.
He left Baltimore hidden in a horse van,
that August night in 1970,
buried under a pile of hay!
The feds never knew where he went,
figured he might have fled to Cuba.

I visited him every year in Israel,
always looking over my shoulder,
until he died from bone cancer in 1994.
Mom died a only couple of days later,
both our hearts broken.


Clarinda Harriss's YouTube video reading of "A Daughter Remembers Her Father":



Subscribe and turn on Notifications for Channel 52.


Charles confesses: "Recently, fifty years after her father absconded to Israel in 1970, facing fifteen years in a federal penitentiary, his daughter, Rochelle, now just a year or two shy of 70, broke her silence about her father’s flight from the feds and told all to the Baltimore Sun. I hadn’t known Julius Salsbury was the prototype for Nate Kurtzman in Barry Levinson’s Liberty Heights when I had an opportunity to be an extra in a Yom Kippur synagogue scene in 1998."

CHARLES RAMMELKAMP is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. Two full-length collections were published in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books. A poetry chapbook, Mortal Coil, has just been published by Clare Songbirds Publishing.

2020 Best of the Net Nominees

Every poem I publish at The Five-Two is a favorite of mine, so in past years I've allowed readers to vote on three of my six submissions for Sundress Publications' Best of the Net anthology.

With the COVID-19 outbreak this year and other business, I had no time to open the voting, but at yesterday's deadline, I submitted the following.

In the order they debuted during Best of the Net's July 1, 2019–June 30, 2020 eligibility period:

• "Intruders at Akumal" by Clarinda Harriss
• "Just Shoot 'Em" by Faye Turner-Johnson
• "The Ogre's Wife" by Robert Plath
• "Prom Queen" by Tom Barlow
• "Autobiography of Ursula" by Margot Douaihy
• "CA" by Ron Riekki

Thanks and good luck to all.

Clarinda Harriss

INTRUDERS IN AKUMAL

We all loved Jonathan, “Yonathan,”
The new night watchman.
Our rented casa had been built by a drummer
With the Grateful Dead,

And we were sure he too would have offered
Sopa de pescada on the patio.
Played something-- drum, cards, charades—
With a new friend as young

As my grandson, who shared with Jonathan
An interest in martial arts.
How strange, then, when my daughter spied
The sweet boy creeping along

The hall leading to our bedrooms, “buscando
Un intruso.” Quizàs, he said,
The one who’d nicked a hundred US dollars
From my grandson’s wallet

The day of the sopa de pescado? The rent agency
Said watchmen were nunca
Permitido to go inside las casas. My daughter
Showed us the loot

Jonathan had abandoned at a side door
in his hasty exit.
It still breaks our hearts to think of it:
A banana and a pear.


Clarinda reads "Intruders in Akumal":



Subscribe to Channel 52 for first view of new videos.


Clarinda confesses: "I had a profound sense that in many ways my family and I were intruders in that gorgeous place near Cancun where only narrow strips of land separate pristine bays and lagoons. We all ended up feeling terribly sorry for the young night watchman we thought we had befriended and who did, indeed, turn out to intrude and rob. (It later developed that in fact it was he who had stolen $100 from the wallet of his "new friend," my grandson. We still felt sorry for him.)"

CLARINDA HARRISS is a professor emerita of Towson University. She has overseen BrickHouse Books, Inc,, for almost 5 decades (going strong).

Clarinda Harriss

NONBELIEVER, AS THE DARK OF THE YEAR APPROACHES

As a nonbeliever in the supernatural
I have just asked a voudou priest I know
to make a doll to protect my good friend
(Catholic, born Jewish) from her mother
who is as malevolent dead as alive.
I have crossed myself half a dozen
times today alone as ambulances shrieked
behind, beside, and before me on the gray
macadam of the city. I have two-fingered
the evil eye at a road-enraged motorist.
I have prepared for All Hallows' Eve
as I do each year when the seasons darken
by digging in my diary for a blurred photo
I snapped from a dead poet's car in Galway,
a tall girl in a long black cloak strolling
in the mist so close to our rented car
her fingertips brushed the door: altogether
oblivious of us on that half-lane mountain
road.  Youth hostel girl, stoned, we figured.
By the turf fire in his smoky sitting room
the inn-keep pulled a book from the shelf.
Local history. "’T was our Maid of Ardmore.
Died for love a hundred years ago."


Clarinda reads "Nonbeliever...":



Subscribe to Channel 52 for first view of new videos.


Clarinda confesses: "Fall always takes me to the supernatural, probably because my son, back in high school, was a great fan of the punk band Samhain named for a Celtic fall festival. (I think.) More immediately: a good friend was having such a run of major bad luck that she asked me to enlist the aid of my home's voudou guardian spirit, Agwe. Poet Louie Crowder, who won a BhB competition a few years ago, is a Haiti-ordained voudou priest and now a friend of mine. He came to our aid with Lasirene, a powerful and glamorous mother spirit. I somehow associate Lasirene with the mysterious figure who walked with Michael Egan and me along a narrow, foggy road in western Island."

CLARINDA HARRISS is a professor emerita of Towson University. She has overseen BrickHouse Books, Inc,, for almost 5 decades (going strong). She is proud to say she has never lived in a house which was not haunted.

Day 9: Charles Rammelkamp on "Daughter of the Confederacy" by Clarinda Harriss

For Day 9 of 30 Days of The Five-Two, frequent contributor Charles Rammelkamp comments on fellow Baltimore poet Clarinda Harriss's "Daughter of the Confederacy". —Gerald So

As she waits for the light to change where Wyman Park drive intersects with Art Museum Drive in Charles Village, Baltimore, the narrator of “Daughter of the Confederacy” sees a man and a woman who appear to be lawyers at the statue of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, astride their horses. It's a statue full of drama: Lee and Jackson are about to part company on the eve of the Battle of Chancellorsville. It's the last time they will ever meet. Jackson will be killed as a result of friendly fire while Lee will be lauded for a victory over a much larger Union army.

This statue, along with several others in Baltimore commemorating Confederate soldiers, may be removed in the aftermath of the racial massacre in Charleston, which was inspired to some extent by the Confederate war flag. The mayor established a commission to review the future of all Confederate monuments in Baltimore, of which there are several; this was also in the wake of the Freddie Gray tragedy.

The narrator assumes these lawyers are here to begin plans for taking the statue down, which may be the case, but as she watches, the two set aside their briefcases and begin to make love on the pedestal right where, as a child, the narrator lay a yellow-rose wreath at the horses’ hooves at the statue’s dedication ceremony.

So what is the crime being committed here? In her confession to "Daughter of the Confederacy," Clarinda Harriss writes, "Though I suppose fornicating at high noon on a public statue is a crime theoretically, the real crime would be to demolish a very rare and beautiful work of art in the name of political correctness."

Though a "daughter of the Confederacy," the narrator declares herself a “flaming liberal.” She does not defend the Confederacy or support what it stood for or have any romantic ideals about its so-called gentility. Her fear is for the monument itself: “I fear for these beautiful horses, Lee’s Traveller//And Jackson’s Little Sorrel.”

She’s got a point. I love that statue, too. —Charles Rammelkamp

Clarinda Harriss

DAUGHTER OF THE CONFEDERACY

Noon in August Baltimore: A young man
in a charcoal-gray suit and rep tie and
a young woman in a severe blue blazer
converge at the Lee-Jackson Memorial.

I always idle at the foot of the larger than life
and largely invisible bronze statue (one of
the few double equestrian statues in the world)
if traffic at the busy yet woodsy intersection

of Wyman Park Drive and Howard Street
doesn't get too honky. I can't believe I wrote
honky, and I do not really digress in saying so
because I am one, and a flaming liberal one,

who nevertheless wore a yellow party dress
to lay a yellow rose-wreath at the pedestalled
hooves . The dedication ceremony: I was nine.
I fear for these beautiful horses, Lee's Traveller

And Jackson’s Little Sorrel. The professionals
there today are obviously lawyers preparing
the work of putting them down. The light changes
but there’s nobody behind me. I watch.

I watch as the pair fling their briefcases down
just about where I laid those roses, clamber up
on the pedestal, and right there, in the noon
shadow of the horses’ long bronze bellies,

begin to make love, disturbing nothing but
a few minor articles of their own clothes.


Clarinda reads "Daughter of the Confederacy":



Subscribe to Channel Five-Two for first view of new videos.


Clarinda confesses: "The poem itself says it all in the way of inspiration. I love the statue, especially the horses, and always lurk at that traffic light as long as I can--it's a route I travel constantly. I do fear its demolition. which has, in fact, been proposed. Mostly I just see pedestal, horses and tired-looking male faces, all stone and bronze--but sometimes more fleshly visions appear. The story in the poem is true. Though I suppose fornicating at high noon on a public statue is a crime theoretically, the real crime would be to demolish a very rare and beautiful work of art in the name of political correctness."

CLARINDA HARRISS is professor emerita of English at Towson University and the longtime publisher of BrickHouse Books, Inc., Maryland's oldest literary press.

30 Days of The 5-2 - Day 14: Temporary Knucksline

Crime author Charlie Stella surveys his favorite 5-2 poems and interviews Clarinda Harriss about "Sweet-talk Me on Valentine's Day".

See the full 30 Days of The 5-2 schedule.

Clarinda Harriss

SWEET-TALK ME ON VALENTINE'S DAY

Call me a monster, I'll straddle you with my
Loch Ness legs, drip my hair on your gasping.

Tell me my eyes are the color of pond scum.
I'll open wide to flash you their fish.

Call me your whore so I'll know you're thinking
of Babylon, how I’m all of its seven wonders.

Insist I’m a bitch, I’ll snap at your parts
till your bark’s peeled to a whipped yelp.

Or say, "Happy Day, my Ancient"; I'm your
whole history of mothers, and mothers work

like this: put something in, get something out.
In, out. In, out. Baby, I’m a sweet machine.


Clarinda reads "Sweet-talk Me on Valentine's Day":



Subscribe to Channel Five-Two for first view of new videos.


Clarinda confesses: "'I never write Occasional Verse.' That's what I used to say before realizing that somebody I once had a considerable crush on was going to be attending a reading where I was to be one of the featured poets. It was scheduled for Valentine's Day a year ago. I wrote this poem especially to titillate him. I am pretty sure it did not, and it had lasting consequences: Now I'm forced to utter the much weaker statement, 'I almost never write Occasional Verse.'"

CLARINDA HARRISS is a professor emerita at Towson University, where she chaired the English Department for a decade during her many decades of tenure there. She directs BrickHouse Books, Inc., Maryland's oldest literary press. Most recent books: Mortmain, Dirty Blue Voice, and Air Travel. She and Moira Egan recently co-edited Hot Sonnets (Entasis Press, 2011), an anthology of 20th-21st-century erotic sonnets. Her continuing research interests include writing from prisons.