Here is my latest poem, titled “Split Level in Jersey”. I hope you enjoy!

I remembered the leisure-filled days of summer
at Fort Lee in 1986.
Edgewater still had boulevard dotting monolith warehouses then.
Sun came down heavy and humid like A wet flannel sheet
The “gold coast” was beginning to be marketed–
a dirt-strewn gaggle of geese trying to escape a garden keeper’s rake,
a little bit Mediterranean brash and brassy up above on “the cliffs,”
Though still as covertly there in a Byzantine way as anything
in Greenwich or Massachusetts
in the land of the Brave and Home of the Free.
The 90s hadn’t fully enveloped us yet, A pale green tsunami of cool irony and laughter to come.
We were still waiting for someone else– My cousins were young and mostly innocent as Yiayia rolled the filo dough of her spanakopita and regaled us with her very own
Cinderella story
–Of growing up half in Greece under an evil aunt–
Listening In the cave-warm coziness of my aunt and uncle’s two-story house
Slightly gauche Mediterranean split-level On Anderson Avenue.

The cerulean blue of the Agean always stood out in her oil paintings.

Even when the perspective was slightly askance like in
A church that looms monumentally cartoon-like at an improbable Don Quixote angle
Over the village square
Her blues, searingly honest
Against the bleached white facades Of village rectitude, telling a different story– in duets, in competing colors
We listened, we watched, and we mentally noted. I laughed even recklessly, and we threw down the finest tendrils
Into the too-late 20th-century loam of the North Jersey suburbs.
Whatever of it was left
From cascades of over-building.
We never went out into the backyard.

I remember when Peter, my Uncle, drove me down to Edgewater once.
“This used to be all warehouses in the sixties.”
Or I saw the warehouses, and he never said it. I cannot remember for sure.
Edgewater had a driving range later in the `aughts.
I used to go there when I started my fluorescent bulbed office days of document review jobs.
So much repetition
Responsive/nonresponsive

Golf balls flying in crazy light
seeking the Hudson.
They reached a preposterous height, when you hit off the second floor.
I wanted to belong
So badly,
Somewhere.

Those later days
Were they anywhere in all of their simulated togetherness?
As evanescent as they were for me now. In the end, I told myself
no one likes an exiled son.
Who can blame them?
a little bit of the obscure stench of seafaring exile lingers on you even after you return eagerly
Newly roughshod.

For a reunion,
Goodbye Columbus,
Goodbye New Jersey,
Goodbye Athens–though you never visited. Like this could have been you but for the sins of someone?
their Father and Mother.
No, not exactly–
Everyone has limits to their goodness, Like those structures in her oil paintings, Cartoonishly stretched to contain something within.
Who wants to be reminded?
Who wants to be implicated?
Could it have been that bad?
We loved him so much still.
Seems alright if annoying in his Heathcliff pride
An Oedipus- boy half-abandoned on a Mountainside
Alien truths, alien people, alienated but at home
Your cousins knew it, too.
“We were always good with English, Jamie,” my Father once said.
Out of the nowhere blue
In Bernardsville NJ–the Veteran’s Hospital fluorescent lights flickering in August,2008. He was right, too.