April 18, 2021 - “Anvil” - Robin Romeo

Anvil

An open mike is our beacon of compulsion.
It’s early days—us reading

poems from a stage, to get the real
critique live from peers and those at it for decades.

There are lines that don’t clear the lips, and lines
someone recites to you later in the evening.

These are days of heavy traffic between East
Village and West. The Nuyorican is New Mecca—

our word-lab—its load-bearing pillars reticent;
Lois Griffith serene as a ballast in trance.

It’s obvious. Can’t spell Loisaida without Lois.
Holman MC-ing the slam, injecting wit and next-

world poetics, Keith catalyzing new talent.
Sirowitz reads from the Mother Said series.

Dr Tracie is fresh/oblique—glissando/arpeggio-poetics.
Patron Saint Cannon, of the irascible persona,

intolerant of introductions (read the goddam poem!),
the writer-professor first-name with glaucoma,

with Reed and Troupe and Parks. He gets
invited to every art gallery opening worth attending.

Last part of the night, Ozzie delivers the latest
installment of Dr Lockjaw and Nurse Thorazine

written at the short end of the bar—the little alcove near
the door—twenty minutes before. The very best

part is the rare tiebreaker, the sudden-death haiku seeded by
a single obscure word. The howls can carry an entire evening.

We mastered osmosis when we learned to breathe.
We head out bulging, pressure barely contained.

Venues blossom all over Loisaida—rooms that would
have flooded had ambition been more palpable

too large for our audiences. We are the unlikely;
silently-declared ushers of new poetry in the years

certain to come, eager to be patient, taking turns to
tilt at headwinds, kindred spirits damned

to burdens of audacity. The plan is to engrave
the substrate of new history with our hammers,

the hammers that always end up shaping
us against that anvil too-often mistaken for a saddle.

- Robin Romeo