Welcome to the Neighborhood

An Anthology of American Coexistence

Sarah Green

• Publisher: Swallow Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780804041058
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

How to live with difference—not necessarily in peace, but with resilience, engagement, and a lack of vitriol—is a defining worry in America at this moment. The poets, fiction writers, and essayists (plus one graphic novelist) who contributed to Welcome to the Neighborhood don't necessarily offer roadmaps to harmonious neighboring. Some of their narrators don't even want to be neighbors. Maybe they grieve, or rage. Maybe they briefly find resolution or community. But they do approach the question of what it means to be neighbors, and how we should do it, with open minds and nuance.

The many diverse contributors give this collection a depth beyond easy answers. Their attentions to the theme of neighborliness as an ongoing evolution offer hope to readers: possible pathways for rediscovering community, even just by way of a shared wish for it. The result is an enormously rich resource for the classroom and for anyone interested in reflecting on what it means to be American today, and how place and community play a part.

Contributors include Leila Chatti, Rita Dove, Jonathan Escoffery, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Amina Gautier, Ross Gay, Mark Halliday, Joy Harjo, Edward Hirsch, Marie Howe, Sonya Larson, Dinty W. Moore, Robert Pinsky, Christine Schutt, and many more.

DANIEL B. JOHNSON    poetry

Steel Valley Songbook, Volume I

Praise dead-end signs peppered with buckshot.

Praise shop windows shattered by rocks.

Praise the beige Pinto up on blocks. Praise playing chicken on Butcher Road.

The matte black Camaro praise, and praise the ’71 Chevelle:

blessed be the boy who swerves first.

Praise pig wrestling, cow tipping, cock fighting, arm wrestling, and barn loft boxing.

Praise and praise the prom queen’s ass.

Sweet corn, rhubarb, apple butter, pumpkin bread, and blackberry jam, praise.

Praise the 606-pound squash at the county fair.

Praise bingo, scratch-off lotto, and bagging the limit.

Praise the twelve-point buck strapped to Jimmy Jones’ truck, friends

in orange caps gathered around, beer can in every hand.

Praise Iron City Beer. Praise Red, White, and Blue. Praise Everclear.

Praise sniffing and huffing whatever is slapped with a warning label or without: whip-its, whiteout, model glue, copy toner, paint thinner, gasoline, and fat, black markers.

Praise the view at night—200 feet above the town’s steeples and oaks—from

the highest rung of the water tower.

Praise the urge to jump and praise the harvest moon.

Praise flat light falling on flat land.

Praise and praise the Cuyahoga caught fire. Blessed be the man who keeps his bobber in the water.

Praise the closed mill.

Praise the abandoned strip mine.

Praise the sign that reads DANGER: DO NOT WADE, SWIM, OR FISH HERE! Praise, in jeans shorts and ripped concert T-shirts,

the girls who swim anyway.

Praise the jackknife, gainer, cannonball, psycho, Zeeko, and belly flop.

Praise first sex in a wood-paneled station wagon.

Praise the dirt bike and turnpike. Praise the taxidermied pike—44 inches long and open-jawed—hung above the bar at Penn Grill.

Praise the Gin Mill, Side Door, and Hooker’s Barbershop.

Praise the butch, fade, mullet, Caesar, flattop, and buzz cut.

Praise the Steel Valley. Praise the Rust Belt.

Praise the Mistake on the Lake. Praise the City on Seven Hills. Praise

the Land of Drive-Thru Liquor Stores.

Praise the home of the Fighting Quakers, Potters, Bulldogs, Warriors, Indians, Dukes, Cardinals, and Mighty Clippers.

Praise and praise, forever and ever, the Rubber Capital of the World!

SARAH GREEN    poetry

Assembly

While the bombers were playing basketball

or smoking weed and powering up a level on Xbox, I was falling a little out of my tube top

down the street from them at Christina’s Ice Cream, dropping my sunglasses, trying free

spoonfuls: rose, cucumber, chocolate, green tea.

Last summer, I still hoped a certain man might change his mind.

I swam. I watched The Bachelorette. The loudest noise was my neighbor once a week

at the fire hydrant setting a blue bin full of rinsed-out bottles down. Next door, all three triple-

decker porches glowed at 6 PM from solar lanterns. The bombers were not bombers

yet, just brothers, both younger than me, wrestling. I had some things on my mind, like

which sandwich to buy—while I waited, a very old waitress put up her feet.

She was wearing compression stockings. Last summer, the younger brother decided to grow out

his hair because girls liked it. The right lung of one of my friends showed a dark spot,

another friend called me in tears about a pregnancy she didn’t want, I cried

when a third friend called, finally pregnant. I was happy for her. I traipsed in flip-flops

for some peach muffins, some iced coffee. Men asked did I need help carrying groceries? Men

argued, loud, outside the mechanic’s, about Red Sox trades. We were all very alive—

all of us and the brothers. Who cares? the bombers began to say, I guess, and then believe.

DANIELLE JONES    poetry

Sometimes You Know before You Know

The neighbor who never smiles steps out

of his dress shoes in a parking space, leaves

their velvet mouths to soak, tongues still

lapping the milk-round bellies of clouds.

There are no clues, only pennies pressed

in fresh asphalt, smell of burn, black windows

reflecting the same sunken face, until one day

I see through—she’s surrounded by stacks

of folders to be filed. Destroyed. Sometimes

you never know. I wait for his bus to corner,

but in every dream I have he isn’t on it.

He’s always in the field they found. Sting

of a needle lost. The fruit he asked me

to name, there, rotting on the ground, grass

rippling with flies. I watch the creep

of vine on picket. Or maybe you become

the ghost you’re looking for. If only we

were home now it’d be summer yet, but no—

the dandelion spores keep morphing into snow.

SARAH C. HARWELL poetry

God Speaks through the Seals

The seals returned from near extinction

to rest and brood on a J-shaped brooch,

fastened, a mile long and a few feet wide, to nothing stable,

a breach that interrupts the sea,

that ceaseless and unworried sloshing—

if you wear your glasses underneath

you can see what the sea is wearing—

claws and weird blooming things

and tiny fish flurrying like exploded flowers—

giving rise to words like marl and bight and others

that you rarely say, unsure of meanings—

but under there you understand you don’t belong

to that which causes light to split

into streams, a fish out of water, and so retreat

to shore to watch the seals w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• There Are Birds Here
• Hungry
• I’m a Stranger Here Myself
• My Summer Next Door to the Serial Killer
• Tonight
• Watch
• Neighborhood Watch
• Shelter
• The House on Congress Street
• The Invincible
• Occupants
• Daystar
• House near the Airport
• Aubade in the Old Apartment
• House Hunting
• Writing the Kingdom on Skates
• Religion
• The Summer of the Commune, and Some of the Summers before That
• Some Rules for Foraging (excerpt)
• To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian
• The Neighborhood Hawk
• Some Kind of Sisyphus
• Intimate Selenium
• The Woman Who Was a House
• Exteriors
• Vanquished
• Old
• How to Get Back to Chester
• Name & Address
• Late?
• Animals
• The Street
• Reading Celan in a Subway Station
• Fire Island
• Gay Marriage Poem
• Marriage
• Forest Ridge Farms Nocturne
• Pornograph, with Americana
• Doorstep
• Upon Hearing about the Student Arrested at the Gun Shop
• Free Variation on “Saturday Night in the Village”
• The Population
• Neighborhood
• Song for the Festival
• The Heater Repair Woman
• Blizzard Poem
• City Morning
• Middle Class Love Song
• Announcement: The Theme of Tonight’s Party Has Been Changed
• My Neighbors: I Know Them
• Fireflies
• As I Wander
• The Neighbor
• Thanksgiving: Livingston, New Jersey
• You Know How It Is
• Meteor Dreams
• Racism in America: The Official Report
• American Valentine
• A Map of the World
• Path to Nowhere
• Not Trash Day
• A Small Guest
• Arrest Dance, Oakland, CA
• War Game, America
• Steel Valley Songbook, Volume I
• Assembly
• Sometimes You Know before You Know
• God Speaks through the Seals
• Heidelberg Beach, October
• Winchendon
• Neighbors
• The Kindest
• My City in Two Dog Parks (excerpt)
• Camp and Locust
• Bête Noire Ranch
• The Real West
• The Summer of Whooping Cough
• the war of all against all
• Into the Limen: Where an Old Squirrel Goes to Die
• Neighbor
• Cottage Industry
• Valediction
• What the Living Do
• Perhaps the World Ends Here
• Neighborhood Talks: Opening the Discussion
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Contributors
• Author Index
• Title Index