Ian Khadan

STICKUP KIDS

Two leisure targets walk down Prospect Street, brimmed skullies
and Omavi jeans flapping at their heels in the gray Saturday—
mid-January. It must be the easy Dutch sprightly out the North Face
that wafts the smell of game over to the Jackals waiting 'cross
the yard from old Upsala College, between the abandoned admissions
building and the empty parking lot. They line up one after the other
from out the unkempt landscape and split ranks in flanking
pursuit. There is no chase because the boys are hard and the one
with skin like prey has been waiting to prove himself deadly
before fangs are drawn just below the crotch and fangs are knocked
hard against the skull and the gray noon fades with the Jackals howling
‘round the bend smooth as ghosts, hard like bruised ego, easily as forgotten.


Bob Holman reads "Stickup Kids":



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Ian confesses: "'Stickup Kids' is, unfortunately, inspired by true events. When I was seventeen, a friend and I were robbed at gunpoint in front of our high school, which was constructed from the ruins of the now defunct Upsala College. Thus this poem was given life, eight years later but life nonetheless."

IAN KHADAN was born in Georgetown, Guyana. At nine he moved to East Orange, NJ with his family and now resides in Newark, NJ. He's a graduate of Rutgers University with a B.A. in English. He curates the Ginsberg Turn On series and the Urbana Poetry Slam at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. Go to www.iankhadan.com for more information.

Hal Sirowitz

THROUGH PINK-TINGED GLASSES

Your mother used to live
on Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx

while I was dating her, father said.
Even in those days it was a bad street.

Men were hanging out in front
of stores, obviously not employed

in "nine to five" jobs. What they
were employed at was anybody's

guess, but it certainly wasn't legal.
I saw someone lose a hundred dollars

at a game of craps in the time it took
to walk the length of the block. I once

felt a breeze over my shoulder, heard the sound
of gunfire and hoped the shooting wasn't at me.

I didn't want to be an anonymous victim,
But what I'm really saying is I was so much

in love, the crimes in the street couldn't keep me away.
That's what love does—makes you feel invincible—

makes any neighborhood seem safe.


Bob Holman reads "Through Pink-Tinged Glasses:



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Hal confesses: "I wanted to write something about Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx. I Googled and saw photos of it when my parents were alive. We lived in the Long Island suburbs. That was supposedly a step up. But where there were no sidewalks was basically telling strangers to stay away."

HAL SIROWITZ is a 1994 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry and is the former Poet Laureate of Queens, New York. He worked as a special education teacher in the New York public school system for 23 years. He has written six books on poetry and is arguably best known for the volumes Mother Said, My Therapist Said, and Father Said.