Sin

My brother braces the worn cardboard box against the bed lest the photographs spill from its bowed, damp sides. We didn’t know my mother stored hundreds of photos up there in the dark awkward attic. Setting about my task of sorting treasuring saving all these people and places I am stopped by Aunt Shirley.

My Aunt Shirley, who had moved off Staten Island,

who had a good job, worked in a Manhattan bank,

 who had her own apartment off Washington Square,

who was the most devout Catholic of the bunch of them,

who was in love with her best friend's fiancé,

slept with him, became pregnant and in June of 1952

slit her throat with Grandpop's razor in the white tile bathroom 

of my grandparents' big house on Castleton Avenue.

A man, a neighbor, broke open the door, and so Nana found her. 

Blood, screams and whispers, then a priest who refused 

to say Mass at her funeral or bury her in a consecrated grave. 

Maybe my mother wanted to die too, but she was a wife 

who had children to raise, and a house in New Jersey to keep.

My mother never talked about her sister, but Dad told us. 

I have the photos, can see how close, how alike they'd been back then—

small girls, school girls, teenage brunettes with trim figures, unguarded eyes.

Now that Mom has died, I meet Aunt Shirley. 


a version of this poem was first published at Sheldon Lee Compton's Revolution John magazine

A Story from When They Lived on Staten Island: Nonnie and the Garage Monster

Nonnie followed her brother Peter all the way to a house she'd never been to before. Not next door. Far away. Peter said she could come with him. Peter was bigger. All the kids were going. Nonnie walked very fast to keep up, but they got way ahead. Mommy stayed at home. Did Mommy know that Nonnie was going all this way?

All the little kids stopped in front of an old red house with a big porch. Nonnie's much bigger brother, Bobby, was there with his friends. Bobby was in the fourth grade. Peter and Nonnie didn't even go to school yet.

Bobby shouted,"Come on! It's around back of the house. In the garage. Come on!"

Peter turned around and looked for Nonnie. She smiled at him. He looked around at his friends, too. Peter looked worried. Bobby was laughing.

All the kids went with Bobby and the other big boys to the back of the house. There was a garage back there and the door was open. Nonnie's house didn't have a garage. She couldn't see what was in there but she knew it was bad because Peter and his friends yelled and took off running fast.

They were gone! But Bobby was still there. Nonnie looked.

In the big dark of the garage there was a monster in the way back. A monster with only a red and green and yellow head. Just the head and black all around it.  Nonnie screamed and ran to Bobby. He picked her up right away and carried her to the safe front of the monster's house. Then he carried Nonnie all the way home. She cried and cried.

Mommy was mad. Peter had told all about everything.

Bobby got yelled at a lot.  Nonnie didn't want Mommy to stand there yelling at Bobby. She wanted her to hurry up and kill the monster up the street.

"It was only a mask, Mom." Bobby said. "Tommy said his Dad said it came from Africa and was important but his Mom said she didn't want it in the house because it looked too mean so Tommy said his Dad put it up in the garage and we put Billy's flashlight under it and the little kids got scared but it was a joke."

Mommy gave Bobby another piece of her mind, then Bobby got sent to his room. Peter and Nonnie got to make cookies with Mommy. Bobby didn't get any till Mommy cooled off.

First there was an exciting, interesting, scenic, warm, loving, poignant week and then there was a frightening, frustrating, blurry, chilling, discouraging week

What happened was my brother, Drago, and I traveled to Philadelphia to visit my other brother, Leon, his wife, Rae, their new home, their funny, stately, standard poodles, Ajax and Harry, and a bit into the week, go to the Moravian cemetery on Staten Island, New York, where Mom’s, Dad’s, and my brother Ric’s ashes are staying. We met our cousins, Simon and Cosette, at the cemetery and after some time there we went to an excellent Italian restaurant, La Strada, (real name) right there on New Dorp. Simon and Cosette are from different sides of our family, and had only met each other once before, in 2006, when they put my mother’s “cremains” (I didn’t know that word until last March, when Dad died. I don’t like it much. Just don’t.) in the wall, which sits on the highest hill on Staten Island, giving all the ashes and bones  a lovely view of the bay.  Lunches, dinners, a visit with Leon and Rae’s daughter and four month old grandson, playing with the poodles, taking walks around, admiring every single thing about Leon and Rae’s converted carriage house, the kind of Eastern/autumnal weather I miss most, seeing my cousins and helping them get to know each other, which for some reason I felt they already should have -like something got messed up there- all that was very, very fine. I didn’t fall or knock anything over and I think I did a good job of keeping up. Well, Drago was there to help me in the airports, and everyone toned down the outings for me, I think.

Then came a massive change in mood. Right after Drago and I got to the Philadelphia airport, to fly home to Panama City Beach in Florida, I started seeing spidery black things in my right eye. Not your regular floaters-these were seriously alarming. I didn’t say anything about it until after my brother and I got through security, then I told him I had almost no vision in one eye. (By that time, when I looked at what my eye could see, there were only light and dark blurs and possibly a billion little black dots.) We kept calm, probably for each other, and because we both badly wanted to get all the way home without a fuss.  I did indulge in great bursts of cursing, shouting, and bewailing my fate, but carefully kept all that to myself. By the next afternoon I’d seen three eye doctors, and the day after that, a Saturday, I had undergone eye surgery for two retinal tears and a retinal hole. I also looked uglier than I can ever remember looking as in a bloody eyeball, bruising, swelling, one helluva dark, crappy looking, eye. This second week of quiet terror has ended. I still can’t see, but my vision is supposed to come back, and I don’t look as scary. I’ve been told to keep my head down 45 minutes out of every hour, which, of course, I’m not at all good at. But Drago took me back to the eye surgeon yesterday, and the doctor was satisfied with my progress. Our cat and dog have been keeping me company when my brother is out, or in, for that matter, and although I bump into things, I’ve kept my balance almost all the time. (I did fall over an armchair.) I plan to cook tonight-but not chop. I’m not up to chopping.

I know this is a long blog entry, but I’ve been musing all week on the fantasticality of one week rolling right into such an utter mess. Remember the Vonnegut novel where he keeps saying “So it goes…”?  He really had something there, didn’t he?

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