The Brooklyn Dodgers celebrate the winning of game seven of 1955 World Series on October 4, 1955 with Johnny Podres, center, Roy Campanella, right and Don Hoak.
The school bell’s rapid clanging sends shivers
through my thighs and tingles through my testicles.
The smell of the chalkboard fills my nostrils,
like the white dust flying free
of the gray felt erasers I slammed
together in the schoolyard with my chum,
red-haired Alan Charney, known for
his gnawed nails and ragged cuticles;
who licked the rock salt from his reddened fingers
in the winter cold and broke a well-known rule
by entering the girls’ bathroom on a lark;
who liked the outdoors and any excuse
to get away from the boring drone
and confined space we visited daily,
the halls and rooms of P.S. 193;
the gates we entered and left through,
the chain-link fence we often climbed,
the place to which we now return in memory,
the place we we’d hardly recognize today.
Background:
One of many poems that draws on my memories of life in Brooklyn, N.Y., where I was born and raised, schooled and acculturated. It was published in the 2019 Voices Israel anthology.
