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CAUGHT IN THE NET 140 - POETRY BY
DOMENIC SCOPA
Series Editor - Jim Bennett for The Poetry Kit -
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|
bronzed by sunset motor into port
with full catches,
and how the sun roughened fishermen
hose down their decks,
watching not to slip on grime.
from Adirondack Chairs by Domenic Scopa |
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CONTENTS
1 - BIOGRAPHY
2 – POETRY
Adirondack Chairs
Maggiacomo
Walk-In Closet
Overgrown Hedges
Secret Cemetery
Little Lake Sunapee
Mornings Calm
IV
Veterans Stoned |
3 - PUBLISHING HISTORY
4 - AFTERWORD
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1 – BIOGRAPHY: Domenic Scopa
Domenic Scopa is the 2014 recipient
of the Robert K. Johnson Poetry Prize and Garvin Tate Merit Scholarship. He is a
student of Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he studies Poetry and
Translation. He has worked closely with a number of accomplished poets including
National Book Award Winner David Ferry and Washington Book Prize recipient Fred
Marchant. His poetry has been featured in
Misfit Magazine, Poetry Pacific, Untitled with Passengers, Gravel, Crack the
Spine, Stone Highway Review, Apeiron Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly,
Literature Today, and
Tell Us a Story.
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2 - POETRY
for JLM
Low tide odor
drifts up the knobby hill
from Portland harbor.
At the top,
they’re there,
two of them,
Adirondack chairs in pebbled beds,
and they rise like wooden thrones
to overlook the pier,
their legs rotten & stubborn,
their seats faded.
I would have liked to bring you there
to sit with me again,
to watch the lobster boats
bronzed by sunset motor into port
with full catches,
and how the sun roughened fishermen
hose down their decks,
watching not to slip on grime.
Remember summer?
Manic raindrops pattered mud,
while we recited Dante.
We almost drowned in paradise,
and foghorns blared their dirge.
Sometimes I touched your hand across the chairs
and our fingers clasped,
but there’s no hand to take me home, now-
except my own.
I would have liked you to remember
that I was, and am, unwell.
in memoriam Robert Lowell
Maggiacomo
for my grandmother
Your opera career in photographs.
A choir. Which of them was you?
Perhaps it was your cropped pearl hair
that shed its color early.
You never dyed it.
And your neck.
Your taut singer’s neck strained
for the audience, your children, my breastfed self.
The teapot whistled
from your tacky, jaundiced
hutch of a kitchen.
You commanded me to bring Earl Grey
and mistook my name,
a sour odor seeping where you sat
with your legs propped on the velvet recliner.
I could hardly believe how irritated I felt.
You had been doing so well
with names and faces,
your memories now a half-erased
etch-a-sketch portrait.
You always said that Grandpa
was “difficult” and “crazy.”
Either walking his Rottweiler too often
or picking extra shifts up as a janitor at Walmart,
so he could “get away from you.”
If that was his reason, I can’t blame him.
I’m filled with nothing but shame for writing it,
but I couldn’t tell you. You’d just forget.
Walk-in Closet
Nothing can tear down the walk-in closet
where bony hips slammed into me,
my virginity stained to the shag rug.
I thought I could leave it there.
I was seven, I knew nothing.
What was more wonderful
than to be a virgin, clean and sound,
on such a night?
He held my hips, his “tip” for babysitting,
the way I held my girlfriend’s when we made love,
when she pleaded “make me scream,” “make it hurt,”
before I pushed her head to the mattress.
I tried to make it hurt that much.
Overgrown Hedges
For C.A.
My memory is still full of the times
I was buckled to a baby carriage,
dressed in pink overalls,
while you pushed it all around the driveway
and peddled homemade lemonade to panting joggers.
Look over there by your neighbor’s shed.
Right over there was that half buried sewer pipe
where you used to tell me Pennywise the clown
snatched wayward children,
as if we lived in Stephen King’s Maine:
We lie best when we lie to ourselves.
We used to play wiffle ball near that place
until mosquitoes found our shoulders.
It had still been fun for us to come to supper
covered in itchy welts,
having to smear them with calamine lotion
so that we looked like we had vibrant chicken pox.
It is strange coming back to find the lawn unkempt
and the driveway dense with carpetweed.
The hedges never so badly need a trimming.
The mailbox is twenty years old and slants to one side.
This yard has forgotten us.
How minuscule our lives must have been
to not have left a trace.
We all float down here.
Secret Cemetery
fence an unearthed grave
as if exhuming corpses
is a sort of birthday celebration.
A forensic anthropologist,
himself a native Guatemalan,
chisels calcified deposits
collected on the collarbone
of a charred skeleton.
I read that Guatemalans study this profession
with hopes to find their murdered relatives.
Where the soil breaks
in a line of coffee bushes,
two crows flap for lime trees.
The limes look like green lights.
Reagan gave the green light here,
collateral calculated.
But what was that to the indigenous child
burned alive in the village center?
To the pregnant woman hacked in bed?
An infantile skull stares up.
Its toothy grin makes it look
as though it’s either madly laughing,
or lamenting at a joke
the flesh has played on it.
Is he one of those?
Little Lake Sunapee
The buoy beacon bobs,
and repeats its single rhythm,
its base, barnacled and mossy.
I don’t think I’ll reach it.
My pupils widen
with the crescent moon
casting tints of false silver
on the surface
of this crypt-cold reservoir.
The dainty shoreline cottage
with its rickety dock,
lays unused
like the travel journal
you gifted me last summer,
while sparrows bickered
from the smokeless chimney.
Our drunken quarrels
always had an explanation.
When have I never loved
the pain of jealousy?
But this has gone past jealousy
to a mania with the clench
of a madman, a leaping
from the cliff of reason.
You never liked to swim here.
The water must have been too frigid.
Mornings Calm
My grandfather would shoot
the dead end street signs
of backcountry Virginia,
prone in the pickup bed
of the rusted Ford Ranchero
he planned to will to me.
He was investigating if he was still accustomed
to recoil, muzzle flash, gunpowder smell.
I don’t know much
about the Korean War,
except that he received
a terse prosaic from the Draft Board
demanding to give up the farm life he inherited:
his pond with trout and fattened catfish,
the crooning of his cows, those placid bulks
with swollen udders, their tails clotted
with mud and shit.
It took sixteen days
for him to travel to the country
nicknamed “land of mornings calm.”
His drafted farmer friends are still there,
their unrecovered corpses
now fertilizer for the land.
Whenever my grandfather got a chill,
he swore their patient souls
were trying to seize his attention.
The toppled highway sign
is pocked with bullet holes.
IV
Armani the cat was blind in one eye
and his brain was hemorrhaging.
I was livid at the nonchalance as the doctor said it.
Her syringe emptied its contents.
I put my hand on Jessie’s shoulder
as though I understood something of her loss.
She caressed his stationary paw,
saying more with her company at that moment
than all their years together cuddled up in bed,
while she highlighted textbooks
or read short stories of Shirley Jackson,
as if the cat could comprehend “The Lottery.”
Euthanasia,
Greek for “good death.”
Jessie couldn’t even pay for it.
Every month her mailbox housed that death bill,
its flag raised like an arm
begging to ask a question,
feet from where Armani would sprawl
on the concrete walkway,
poised and tame like a mini Sphinx,
waiting for us to come home
just as we waited for the vet
to administer the waxen cobalt
that appeared almost edible in an IV.
Veterans
for Michael Smith
We couldn’t even shotgun Miller Lite.
Even when we cleanly punctured the can,
the diluted beverage sprayed out foam
and spoiled our loose leafed poetry
manuscripts on the patio table.
That morning,
every time Michael
brushed his grandfather’s tombstone off
“out of reverence and respect” he said,
a leaf descended from overhanging cedar boughs.
He told me what his mother said to him:
“you smoke and drink whiskey
just like your grandfather would
during a thunderstorm.”
“I know you never met your grandfather,
but you would have been the best of friends.
If you two went out drinking,
you wouldn’t come home until the sun came up.”
But when the sun retreats so does Michael,
who doesn’t walk to bars alone,
a suspicious face on every passerby
and tan lines where his rings once were.
It began to pour.
Raindrops rattled on a neighbor’s tin-roof shed.
Dead drunk he chain smoked
until the thunderstorm died down.
“Hot Peppers” was originally published in
Les Amuse Bouches March 2012.
“Lullaby” was originally published in
Untitled, with Passengers July 2013, and
Misfit Magazine May 2014
“Sun Cross” was originally published in
Untitled, with Passengers June, 2013
and Crack the Spine July 2013.
“Stoned” was originally published as a different poem, “Beyond Good and Evil,”
which was published in Stone Highway
Review July 2013.
“The Tiber” was originally published in
Apeiron Review August 2013.
“October Hurricane” was originally published in
Boston Thought in 2012,
Venture in 2013, and the Fall edition
of Diverse Voices Quarterly in 2013.
“Adirondack Chairs” was originally published in
Misfit Magazine in March 2014,
Gravel in Spring 2014, and was
specially selected as one of five poems featured in a cultural exchange project
with Poetry Pacific in Summer 2014.
“Walk-in Closet” was originally published in
Misfit Magazine in May 2014, and
Verse Virtual in July 2014.
“Overgrown Hedges” was originally published in
Literature Today in Summer 2014.
“Occupy Prague” was originally published in
Shoutout UK in July 2014.
“Maggiacomo was originally published in
Misfit Magazine in summer 2014, and
Verse-Virtual in July 2014.
“Little Lake Sunapee” was originally published in
Misfit Magazine in summer 2014, and
Verse-Virtual in July 2014.
“The Fourth of July We Me” was originally published in
Verse-Virtual in July 2014.
“Kindergarten” was originally published in
Verse-Virtual in July 2014.
“IV” was originally published in
Verse-Virtual in July 2014.
“Secret Cemetery” was originally published in the
Malpais Review in Summer 2014.
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4 - Afterword
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