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Table of Contents
The Bordighera Poetry Prize
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John Ortenzio Bargowski: Winner
The Bordighera Annual Poetry Prize 2011
Poem Links: CLEANING OUT THE CLOSET|
FATHER AND SON COMMUNION BREAKFAST |
ON THE BLACK AND WHITE
| SNAPPING TURTLE |
DRIVING WEST ON THE PULASKI SKYWAY |
|NEARLY WILD
John Ortenzio Bargowski won the 2011 Bordghera Poetry Prize for $2,000 and bilingual book publicaition. was born and raised in Jersey City and  now lives with his family on a small acreage along the Delaware River in northwestern New Jersey. He is the recipient of a 2009 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Distinguished Artist Fellowship, The Rose Lefcowitz Prize from Poet Lore, and the Theodore Roethke Prize from David Wagoner at Poetry Northwest. Several of his poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His work has appeared on Poetry Daily and been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Sun Magazine, Gettysburg Review, Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, Paterson Literary Review & Journal of New Jersey Poets, among others. Paul Mariani, Distinguished Poet-Judge of the Bordighera Prize for 2011-2012, wrote of Ortenzio Bargowski’s poetry in his winning manuscript:
"Somehow John Oretensio Bargowski has caught the quintessential soul of the Italian-American experience in a New Jersey we will recognize. Here are the subjects, familiar yet freshly observed: the central importance of the family and the household gods, the echoes of the old Catholic rituals, a couple’s courage in dealing as they can with a daughter’s loss, the hundred daily blessings, things we take for granted or never see, until tragedy brings home to us the rock-hard sacredness of what we have: the evening light, the wren’s consoling song, the forlorn Schwinn bicycle in the driveway, the tumbler pigeons your father cared for, the desolation of the empty packing plant facing the Jersey meadowlands, the stark dignity of an ancient grandmother praying in Italian as the TV preacher seems to call to her, the white hair of your wife packing mud up around the roots of the cabbages as she has for decades. All this, and so much more, in lines which capture the New Jersey idiom as William Carlos Williams caught it, but softer this time round, with the winds of the Adriatic mingling with the colder North Atlantic."
Attend The Bordighera Prize Awards Reading & Reception. Admission Free: For more info. click here.
Sample Poems from John's winning manuscript follow-> 
CLEANING OUT THE CLOSET
One by one you lift the plastic covers,
hold each dress against yourself, twirl
and sway, do a two step towards me sitting
on the bed, stretch your hands over your head
and shimmy into the ones you're not sure of,
have me zip and unzip them while you gather
your hair above your shoulders so the loose
ends just brush the back of my hand.
We both see it when you lift the next hanger
off the bar, through the little window in the plastic
—the dress you wore to our daughter's funeral,
the cloth already faded to the color of dried roses,
and I'm not sure if I want you to hang it back up,
to hear the scrape and jangle of the hanger
down the bar, or if I want you to slip your arms
into the sleeves, swish the dress over your head,
smooth the sides down around your waist, twist
your hair up and let me fasten the clasp at your neck.
{First appeared in Meridian]
FATHER AND SON COMMUNION BREAKFAST
If he went the regulars at the D&J Bar wouldn't wait,
their Sunday morning thirst always pressed hard
against the locked door and plate-glass window.
He'd have to pay someone to open up for him
and what good would that do,
I told Sister Phyllis when she announced again
that every father was expected to attend.
She continued with that day's lesson on the Sacred Heart,
gashed and punctured with thorns,
so swollen from our sins,
and the saints with their flayed skin
and flaming tongues, their lean, bright faces
glowing above us as they stood in their patient line
to slake their endless thirst for grace and sacrifice.
Stephen and Paul with their hands out,
John of the Cross and the Little Flower,
Lucy and The Holy Innocents, all of them
watching everything down here go wrong,
my father in the church basement with his scrambled
eggs and cold toast, the D&J dark inside,
the Saturday night slop still on the floor,
the bar sticky and unwiped;
outside, Stosh Gazinski, tapping the face of his Timex,
Bill Feehney staring at the reflection of his third Camel
in the plate-glass,
and Big Frank Stauch with one foot up
on the marble step, his scuffed sole impatiently
waiting for father to unlock the door.
{First appeared in Poetry Northwest)
ON THE BLACK AND WHITE
The nights he preached
Nonna would call me into her room
to lace and tie her black orthopedics,
tune in the channel, adjust the vertical
and horizontal hold,
make me kneel by her wing chair
and translate chapter and verse
into Italian so she could follow along
in her Nuova Testamenta
to the cure of the Centurion's
servant, the paralytic at Capernaum,
the volume turned up and tinny
for the raising of Jairus's daughter,
the screen sometimes doing a slow flip
through the sermon when a 707
took off from Newark,
the charged air vibrating
the lamp shades and the framed
portrait of her as a young woman
in Bitonto, her left hand already hidden
beneath the folds of her gown,
the packed auditorium breaking
out into a hymn when Oral,
ready for the Lord's work,
removed his suit jacket
and invited the afflicted
to approach, my cue to raise
Nonna’s hand to the top of the set,
hold it over the hundred red-eyed
tubes while the aisles filled
with the sick and the infirm,
one by one the laying on of hands,
the camera zooming to Brother Roberts
raised arms and sweaty face
as he called down the Spirit,
panning the empty wheel
chairs, the walkers left behind,
me afraid to lift Nonna’s hand
off the RCA as the credits
rolled across the screen
and the believers staggered
back to their seats.
{First appeared in Poetry Northwest)
SNAPPING TURTLE
He could live to be a hundred,
I told my grandson,
thinking of the massive one
goggle-eyed and trailing ribbons
of bright green algae—
found lumbering roadside
with Civil War musket balls
embedded in the muddy ridge
of his back.
The blue and the gray,
brother against brother, sometimes
father versus son back then
I said, pointing south
past the Kittatinnies
toward the mowed fields
where the white stones begin,
each one marking the spot
where soldiers from both sides fell,
the two of us followed
while the snapper spat
and hissed from his hooked beak,
toothless,
but easily able
to chomp a finger or two
if we taunted him,
his bulging black eyes
watching every shift
of our long September shadows,
that craggy prehistoric brain,
destined to outlive us all,
urging him to stick hard
to the path he’d chosen
through the shale-crusted meadow
down to the deep murk
of our closest neighbor’s pond.
{First appeared in Southern Poetry Review)
DRIVING WEST ON THE PULASKI SKYWAY
Not in a corner of heaven but under the sink
between the pipes and cleaners
my father hides the smooth-necked
bottle with the squeaky cap.
He is holding a glass up to the light,
staring at it like a jeweler or a disoriented bird
trying to find his way back to Chicago
or Detroit, governed by instinct, looking for
some kind of landmark, the Stockyards
maybe, or the Ford plant at Highland Park,
something Midwestern,
something he can get a grip on.
After he finishes he wipes his lips
with the back of his hand, this is his escape,
this is what his swollen belly needs.
My mother has a saying she keeps in her purse
Quando sogni un morte ti allunga la vita,
loosely translated as when you dream of the dead
it lengthens your life.
She is Baresi, in her world
the evening moths are souls leaving Purgatory
and the best saints have a nose for water
and the winning numbers.
In her dreams he is silent.
Tonight I am with him,
we are two stones skipping over a river,
we are driving the Pulaski Skyway,
the black Pontiac a little over the yellow line,
his sleeves rolled up, one hand on the wheel,
the other remembering the names
of his flock of homers,
their sleek iridescent napes and four yellow toes,
three forward and one, the hallux
or big toe, behind.
You know, he says, what looks like the leg
is really a lengthened foot
and what looks like the knee is really the ankle,
the true knee hidden by feathers
under the body.
He is rambling on about the power of pigeon milk
and how the Romans read the future
in the flight of birds,
driving west on the Pulaski Skyway past Kearny
and Harrison and Newark singing a ditty,
something about counting
the shadows of blue pigeons
on a red brick wall.
(First appeared in Voices West)
NEARLY WILD
Let's take the sharp knife,
stand together at the sink
and cut each stem under
warm running water,
let's pretend we don't see
the petals already withering
along the fringes,
rust pustules spreading
from sepal to sepal,
let's strip the leaves
the beetles have been at
and lie to each other
about the thorns,
let's mix in sword ferns,
a sprig of baby's breath
and arrange them all
in a jar of rainwater
and buffered aspirin,
collect every grain
of pollen the anthers spill
on our table and use it
to spice our tea.
(First appeared The Gettysburg Review)
Copyright
© 2011 by John Ortenzio Bargowski from his book Dynamite(Bordighera Press, NY, 2012.) All rights, including electronic, are reserved by the author and can only be reprinted by permission.
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