|
|
Charles Fishman
|
Poetry
|
|
|
Wheeler Avenue
|
|
Amadou Diallo was killed at 1153 Wheeler Avenue on February 4,
1998 by four NYPD officers dressed in civvies. 41 shots were fired,
and 19 hit their mark.
In 1948, I didn’t know we had all been sliced
into races. Wheeler was my block, 1145
the two-story walk-up where my family lived.
I didn’t know it was the Soundview section
of the Bronx or that the Bronx wasn’t Brookline.
There was no yellow crime-scene tape, only yellow
and white chalk marks on the gray sidewalk.
1145 kicked like a nightstick when Amadou died
a few potsy-steps from Bruckner: on a clear winter
midnight, memory couldn’t help him survive.
I want to speak of his crime: how he stood in that red-
brick doorway and couldn’t find his tongue, how he knew
no words would help him, that nothing he could say
in the blinding light of four drawn guns would sound like
I am a man, and this is where I belong.
|
|
Writer
Bio
|
Charles Fishman is director of the Distinguished Speakers Program at SUNY Farmingdale, where he previously directed the Visiting Writers Program for eighteen years. His books include Mortal Companions, The Firewalkers, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, and The Death Mazurka, which was selected by the American Library Association as one of the outstanding books of the year (1989) and nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He has received numerous awards and honors, including the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize from Southern California Anthology, the Eve of St. Agnes Poetry Prize from Negative Capability, and a fellowship in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He was final judge for the 1998 Capricorn Book Award and has recently served as Poetry Editor for the Journal of Genocide Studies and Cistercian Studies Quarterly (following Denise Levertov in that position). Currently, he is Associate Editor of The Drunken Boat. His eighth chapbook, Time Travel Reports, was recently published by Timberline Press.
carolus@optonline.net
|
|
Other
Pedestal Published Works
|
|
|
|
|
|
