Al Ortolani
8mm Winter
There’s an 8mm film, nearly bleached with age of my father on the ice with my sisters, one held by each hand, as they scoot across the pond on Christmas skates, and then, he releases his grip, letting them go to worry little circles in the ice, and he, as if finally freed, and giving them their lead, skates off into a memory of earlier ponds, his long coat swinging right and left as his blades power across the gray ice, alone to work the muscles he’d learned as a boy. He turns seemingly without effort, skating backwards to watch his girls chopping across the pond with their small hatchet feet. He never slows until sweeping to a stop to gather his coat about him, his breath a vanishing cloud.
Captain Crunch
On winter nights when my daughters were tucked in their beds, warm against the world, I knew exactly where they were, how their blankets were turned up like heavy collars, the tops of their heads just visible above their blue and white quilts. On subzero mornings after the snow had fallen, and then frozen again, I’d hear a dog moan in a long wail down the alley. Her howl was as regular as the newspaper man’s Oldsmobile, his tires crunching slowly down the street, his son leaning from the window tossing the Morning Sun. One day, I told myself, I will free the neighbor’s dog, unlatch her frozen gate and bring her home to a warm kitchen, her new bed a flea market rug on the furnace register, and when my daughters wake to milk and Cap’n Crunch, they can sit on the linoleum floor and rub her neck, melting the ice from her collar.
Trash Men Dancing on the Curb
Two men, the ones assigned to ride the back of the truck, pause from their dumpster diving and hold up dresses they have salvaged from the neighbor’s trash. One holds a yellow sleeveless to his shoulders and begins dancing down the curb’s rain gutter. The other puts on a straw hat and thumbs a blue skirt to his waist. Together, they shimmy their hips before the sun rises over the house with the Doberman, a small-town manse with colonial windows and locked French doors. The driver in the cab smokes, his face squared in the side mirror, pale like a catalpa blossom.
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Al Ortolani’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Rattle, New York Quarterly, and Prairie Schooner. His most recent poetry collection is Controlled Burn, published by Spartan Press in 2024. His poetry has been featured in American Life in Poetry, the Writers Almanac, and Poetry Town. He was a 2019 recipient of the Rattle Chapbook Prize.