Winter Solstice Pizza Dreams
It all starts the evening before –
at Pasquale’s
a few blocks from here –
with the thin-crust
La Gardener pie:
A hidden rhythm of
elongating days;
bare ginkgo trees
coming into focus
through the chill fog;
Yuletide cheer &
cold Minnesota beer
in the clinic lobby;
bathing suit drying
in the bright bathroom;
atypical black & white girl
whose Carey Mulligan face
is never seen looking out
the window of her midwestern
hotel under cloudy skies;
crossing Second at Third to
catch the Gonda 8 elevator
for the appointment with
the fat aspirant needle;
yawning while
filling the 2-gallon
red plastic piss pitcher
over three days;
scraping, again, at
the eczema of memory
in this dry climate
of fear,
near where
the angry pickles grow
through centuries of neglect
under blankets of invisible snow &
carry-ons wander alone
in the gray parking lot while
tan fan-shaped ginkgo leaves
dance in the wind to
the Nutcracker.
I see the crows
in the grainfield
where the old white silo once stood:
dead earth in winter.
M F Drummy
M F Drummy holds a PhD in historical theology from Fordham University. The author of numerous articles, essays, poems, reviews, and a monograph on religion and ecology, his work has appeared, or will appear, in Allium, [Alternate Route], Anti-Heroin Chic, DarkWinter, Emerge, FERAL, Heimat Review, Last Leaves, Main Street Rag, Marbled Sigh, Meetinghouse, Muleskinner, Persephone, Poemeleon, The Word’s Faire, Winged Penny Review, and many others. He and his way cool life partner of over 20 years enjoy splitting their time between the Colorado Rockies and the rest of the planet. He can be found at https://bespoke-poet.com
Why Martheaus Loved This Poem:
I'll be straight up with y’all: my eyebrow hairs stood on ends when I first saw a right-justified poem. Though--as I entered the poem--I found its placement on the page to be yet another vivid aid to pulling off the a-logical world of the poem. I appreciated how M F put it to me: the right-justified structure lends to the surrealness and reality-clashing tone of the poem.
I really fell in love with the dreamscape “Winter Solstice Pizza Dreams” floats you down (darn, now that I’ve written that sentence I’m thinking of Willy Wonka on the LSD chocolate river boat). Its line breaks emphasize such a great momentum and, even though the lines are short, they carry such delicious (intentional pizza pun) language: "A hidden rhythm of / elongating days; / bare ginkgo trees / coming into focus" and "scraping, again, at / the eczema of memory / in this dry climate /of fear" to name a few personal favorites.
As you read this one, try charting those "elongating days." It was a lot of fun for me. Notice the use of time, growth, ever-shifting weather, and multiple setting shifts all contributing to this wandering distortion. There's such a subtle development happening with the sense of yearning for what's out of reach.
Interview with M F Drummy
Gosh, I was really taken by the motion of this poem and how it kept shifting from unique actions and places. What was the process for getting these lines, and where does the dreaminess come into play?
This poem was written after my wife and I had taken a road trip just before Christmas to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester MN. I was the patient. I underwent an unbelievable amount of testing in the 3 days we were there and that experience was somewhat dreamlike in and of itself. There are some references to specific tests and cross-streets and the clinic itself. And we did actually have pizza our last night there I believe at a pizza parlor near our hotel named "Pasquale's". But I woke up early the next morning from troubled dreams (our last morning in Rochester - I still had one more test scheduled later that morning) and that is when this poem began to take shape in my head. That last couple of stanzas of the poem were generated from our drive back to CO across MN and IA and NE just as winter was making itself known.
There's an extended image with this "atypical black & white girl / whose Carey Mulligan face / is never seen looking out / the window of her midwestern /hotel." Could you talk about how you see this development of this image/character?
One night during our stay in Rochester we watched Maestro with Bradley Cooper (who also directed) as Leonard Bernstein and Carey Mulligan as his wife Felicia. It was shot entirely in black-and-white so that is how that moment in the poem found its way in. No real development of the character - just part of a series of dreams and daydreams. More evocative and fluid than anything else. I wanted to convey that sense of gray overcast weather and a washed-out Midwestern winter.