Cord Moreski

 

Teenage Wasteland
for Tohm Bakelas

Eighteen is a few hours away
and with that you’ll leave

with only a high school education
a duffle bag full of clothes

a Greyhound schedule
you’ve memorized for months

and pay saved from washing dishes
and scrubbing away at shit stains in toilet bowls

your mother will be too busy
snorting oxy on the dinner table to notice

your stepfather too hungover to challenge
your manliness to another fistfight

you raise the volume on your radio
and hum along to the music playing

but not too loud
while you glance over your shoulder

then back out your bedroom window
into the quiet, inviting night.

Cord Moreski

Welcome

You hit the buzzer at the front entrance
to let me know that you’re here

so I make my way down the hall
between the company of neighbors’ doors

I pass by the smells of bong rips
and of burning dishes that set off alarms

I pass by the thunder of dogs barking
that I’ve been told were friendly

and of heavy basslines that try
to drown out the moans from people fucking

I pass by the looks of doormats that aren’t welcoming
and of eviction notices accumulated on the floor

I pass and pass until I walk down the stairs
and see you there waiting for me.

“Come on in,” I say, “just watch your step.”

____________

Apartaparty

These college kids
who recently moved in
invited all the neighbors over
for an apartment warming

I knew better though
than to stay for too long
so I poured a few Natty Ices
from the keg in the bathtub

made some compliments
about their used furniture
and beach towels replacing
curtains in their windows

before I finally
headed back to my unit.

The police came later that night
after more friends of friends arrived
and the alcohol started to talk

after someone’s girlfriend
kissed somebody else
in a bedroom closet
resulting in a kitchen knife
being wielded.

That was all last week
and I haven’t seen them since.

____________

Teenage Wasteland

for Tohm Bakelas

Eighteen is a few hours away
and with that you’ll leave

with only a high school education
a duffle bag full of clothes

a Greyhound schedule
you’ve memorized for months

and pay saved from washing dishes
and scrubbing away at shit stains in toilet bowls

your mother will be too busy
snorting oxy on the dinner table to notice

your stepfather too hungover to challenge
your manliness to another fistfight

you raise the volume on your radio
and hum along to the music playing

but not too loud
while you glance over your shoulder

then back out your bedroom window
into the quiet, inviting night.

____________

Dead of Night

for Stephanie Simonetti

You open the front door
because you notice
that it’s happening again

the stirring the lonely light

then ask yourself
what’s been keeping
the neighbor up this late
from across the hall

until suddenly
they unlock their front door
step out to notice
you standing there

asking the same thing.

 

 

 

Gone Fishing by Cord Moreski

for Charles Joseph

I finally get hold
of Charles on the phone
to see what he’s been up to.
“Gone fishing,” he tells me.

I mention some new poems
I wrote down this morning
he talks about some fluke he caught
in the bay behind his apartment.

“Any keepers?” I ask.
“Not a chance in hell!”
I go back to my writing
from earlier today and agree.

Three Poems by Cord Moreski

Brooklyn by the Sea

My friend Charlie tells me as we sit on a bench
and wait for the last train of the night to arrive
that he doesn’t even recognize his own city anymore.
The house he grew up in on Cookman is a hot yoga studio,
and the school he attended as a kid is now a block
full of luxury townhomes, even the landmarks
and mom-and-pop shops he used to haunt
are being traded in for trendy art murals and lots
for overpriced food trucks. But the contractors keep
buying and flipping, destroying and rebuilding,
so that it’s not so easy to hear those Springsteen songs
among the constant drilling along the boardwalk anymore.
Charlie tells me that his landlord is raising his rent again
and that maybe his luck would be better if he moves out of New Jersey.
Then he gets quiet for a moment as we watch our train pass us by
like a fleeting memory, like a lifetime flashing before the inevitable death.
So we both decide that all there’s left to do is walk
but have trouble figuring out which direction is home.

 

 

Disappearing Act

 

Ricky was always into magic.
That summer when my pals
and I were all twenty-two years old,
we bought a few cases of PBR each night,
lit a bonfire on the beach and watched
as Ricky did the damndest things.
He bent quarters with his forehead,
plucked rose petals from the back of earlobes
and always, for his final trick, helped make
the rest of our beer vanish into his belly.
But one day he stopped coming around.
Word was that his father tried to convince him
into joining the army, but Ricky ran away
before he could ever sign the papers.
His dad would ask us from time to time
if we had heard any news about his son,
but we all knew that magicians
never revealed their secrets.

 

Tomorrow

Back then, my friends and I
swore time would never catch us.
We drove fast. Brawled much.
Dragged Reds past the filters
and found God at the bottom of bottles.
We’d stay up all night mocking
the galaxies that had already died
not realizing it would eventually
become tomorrow.

 

 

 

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