Santiago Mejia / San Francisco Chronicle / Polaris

What I have learned and what I know for sure is that life is very long except when it’s very short, and it just might be both, and at the same time.

In the grand scheme of things, after all, there may be no grand scheme of things, and writing a poem may amount to an act of disruption in and of itself.

Nonetheless, the arc of this trajectory of mine may perhaps be traceable in two memoirs I wrote, Subway to California (2014) and The Pope of Brooklyn (2017), or in my novels published since 2000. Perhaps it’s all too simple. The only explanation for the arrival of any poem or poet is or is not to be finally found, for better or worse, in the poem itself. Beyond that, what explains the rupture that makes the opening for a poem?

In certain moods it feels like there was this moment I never saw coming, between when I stopped writing poems and before I began again, when I was waiting and waiting and waiting for the next line to materialize. And then I wrote it down.

Summer 2023

Postscript to My Last Resume: “It’s Always Been Poetry (Because Even When It Wasn’t, It Was”)

  • We weren’t the first family to skip town and we wouldn’t be the last. Nothing awaited us elsewhere, but elsewhere did have one big advantage: It was not Brooklyn. Brooklyn, however, was not the problem. As I would one day find out, the FBI was on my father’s trail. Who wouldn’t call that a problem?

    — Subway to California

  • Irish and the Italians. The Irish may have invented talking, but the Italians invented never shutting up…. Stereotypes like these may come in handy, insofar as each contains a germ of truth. Thus only a fool subscribes. The Italians and the Irish. They were exactly the same, only completely different.

    The Good Family Fitzgerald

  • I was assured a job description would be on my desk on day one. No such document appeared on that day or any other, but to be fair, neither did a desk upon which it could materialize. Instead, I operated upon a sturdier-than-it-looked LEGO-like construction of interlocking red and blue plastic milk crates…. For stability sake, my crates were propped against what seemed to be a bullet-riddled, pockmarked wall…where I would have plenty of space for graffiti or for tacking up precious photos of pet tugs and tables and significant others. I am pathetic when it comes to photos, but I am a champ when it comes to cultivating insignificant others.

    Sibella & Sibella

  • Decades ago I was a curious little boy who didn’t know what the old man did all day, or if he kept a job, or where he went when he shambled out of our shotgun Greenpoint apartment and shuffled down the flights of stairs and onto the street or hopped into a car that sped off. When I found occasion to ask him my incessant questions, his invariable response was: Whaddayou, writin’ a book?

    The Pope of Brooklyn

  • It was a rosacea-cheeked, sad-eyed, big-shouldered man who noticed the Monarch. Stephen was a member of a Catholic religious order, the Holy Family Brothers. His was an order beleaguered, like many others, by civil lawsuits and criminal investigations, and he was in the thick of every controversy. He was called Brother Stephen and today he was dressed as usual in his plain black robe and white collar. He was fifty-five years old and the butterfly would outlive him. Brother Stephen had one minute left.

    All for Now

  • “One two one two three. Slow slow quick quick slow. Your whole life is nothing but a tango.” Mikey had his arm around Zayana, holding her close but not tight, and he had no reason in the world to believe the tango and the night would ever come to an end.

    The Alzhammer

  • Tonight, even I can write the saddest lines While she is luminally framed, ascending her stairs, Going up always where endlessness begins. So we’ll wash our dishes till sunup And listen for the music from her forest of spoons.

    Poems in Which
    “Poem in which he attempts an answer to Pablo Neruda’s question—‘In the end won’t death be an endless kitchen?’”

  • “Blackie, when’d you get married?” “Man, I remember like it was yesterday. That was the week I was going to the slammer, which I did eighteen months standing on my head.” “Why’d you get married when you were going up the river?” “You kidding? On account the congenial visits.”

    Sun City

Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 1950s

“Joe’s family background might have been filmed by Martin Scorsese in the mode of Goodfellas.”

— Joyce Carol Oates, Cal Alumni Magazine