Her mother relates to her daughter my Jewish wife
walking to elementary school by a cigar manufactory
in a sidewalk-level store in Manhattan’s Lower East Side
a Jewish immigrant neighborhood in early depression ‘30s
In the stone and concrete heat of the city
no air conditioning at floor-to-ceiling store windows,
women work with their hands in chairs facing the street
their cheap dresses pulled up to their waists
roll Cuban tobacco leaves in their thigh’s sweat
for men to smoke in gentlemen-only city clubs
the spice of estrogen stoking their dreams of wealth and power
I would ask in an affectation I enjoyed then
and even today does not embarrass me
at high-end Pittsburgh restaurants
for a selection of cigars for after-dinner smoke
enjoyed with fruity Sandeman Tawny port
Now I walk along Lincoln Nebraska’s residential streets
summer evening swelter
three-story 19th century Victorian houses set amid trees
with front doors and windows open for the breeze
divided into apartments for impecunious doctoral students
yellow incandescent lights illuminate sparsely furnished rooms
the aroma of cheap ground meats leak through the screens
seem like home to me though I never lived there
I feel companionship for the intellectual work force
struggling to write decipherable research treatises
who live in teaching assistant servitude
as Jews who build pyramids
crowd slave slums nearby
scrawl hieroglyphic graffiti on stone walls
and sketch pornographic images of women
mounting clay pots with phallic spouts
I eat spaghetti and meatballs at Duffy’s Tavern
recommended by an Air Force serviceman
stationed at a nearby base
I request al-dente
“what’s that?” the waitress asks
but the pasta served is mush
I drink Miller High Life on fellowship
burn calories on the two-mile walk
through the neighborhoods to conference tower
where I stay when not confined alone in an archive
Evenings in my hotel room I watch
the televised Nixon impeachment hearings
and view in fascination from the 10th floor
a thunderstorm a hundred miles away approaches
weather’s ferocious beast uncaged
grinding through the sky throwing off lightning strokes
the very curve of the compliant earth
becomes its heavy wingspread
drubs the ground as but the thin skin
of history’s tom tom war drum
assaults us with thunder
to wrack the silences of the flat Nebraskan land
Here astride the seam of climax grass formations
where prairie and Great Plains diverge
and marijuana grows along rural roads
one epoch is crushed on TV
another roars outside my window
revolution re-educates climates of opinion
smells of gasoline engine fumes and cold spaghetti and pork fat
I would my role play
not as any of us doubt
scratches and lines of ink
could tether the beast released
when we unstack pyramids of learning
with the spice of Fortran code to churn multivariate statistics
on IBM punch cards flipping through machines
that transform holes of research into electrical sparks
feed the storm
— Ron Tobey grew up in north New Hampshire, USA, and attended the University of New Hampshire, Durham. He farms in West Virginia. He writes fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. As an imagist poet, he expresses experiences and moods in concrete descriptions in haiku, lyrical poetry storytelling, audio poetry, and in filmic interpretation. Ron has published widely in poetry journals. He was a finalist in Cleaver Magazine 40th Anniversary Flash Fiction Contest. Ron is active on X @Turin54024117