Kissing Patty McCalla						

Patty, Patty, Patty. When I was seven, all I could think of was Patty. Kissing Patty McCalla. Patty was the tiniest girl in our class, an itty-bitty version of Mary Tyler Moore. Dark hair, impish eyes, the best giggle. For picture day she wore a bright red jumper with chartreuse green leotards and white glossy vinyl Mary Janes. She was the first in our class to wear glasses, but I liked her anyway, maybe more so because of them. 

I chased her around the playground at Elmwood Elementary, around the slide, monkey bars, and teeter totters. In the winter, when the slide iced up, the boys crouched at the top and let our hard slick shoes and gravity carry us precipitously down the metal and across the blacktop. Fledgling ski jump Olympians. (Not the girls as at that time all the girls wore dresses every day.) Some kid was always getting hurt. As skinned knees were a daily occurrence, the teachers kept antiseptic and Band-Aids at the ready. 

We played jets and parachutes on the swings, and once I fell out the back of a swing and passed out from whacking my head. My ejection seat failed to deploy. I wondered if Patty was watching. Mom was called and I ended up spending a night at Mercy Hospital with a concussion beside a boy a little older who had a heart murmur. I threw up twice in one day: once outside the car on the way to the hospital when we took my sister to Grandma Dearman’s. Mom wasn’t keen on leaving my sister there as Grandpa Dearman was a “mean old bastard.” (He was!) And later, because I threw up cherry Jell-O in my bed, it looked like I was bleeding to death. It gave the nurse a fright. I was amazed at how the nurse could change the whole bed while I was still in it. I was even more surprised when the nurse didn’t seem to mind at all unlike my mother under the same circumstances when I had the flu.

Every recess, Patty was there and those fifteen minutes twice a day were bliss. Though I was equally in love with my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Hennell, and wanted to please her by making paintings and practicing the cursive letters lining the borders of the chalkboards, my mind wandered to Patty two rows over and three seats down. I tried many strategies to sit near her in the reading circle. But at recess, there was Patty, right there beside me. I wasn’t interested in shooting marbles in the dirt or playing kickball with the other boys. 

The competition was too fierce. And dangerous. Running towards home, Tom Auger, a boy on my bus route, slid under the chain-linked fence, broke his leg, and spent the next six weeks in a body cast. Though he got behind in school, Tom would later be a high school football star. I was happiest playing with the girls and the other less athletic boys. Girls were more interesting more mysterious, than boys. Why play kickball when there was Patty? 

In return for my affection Patty kicked my chins. I came home once too often with black and blue and variations of purple and green legs. But I endured the pain because it was Patty, and she was my girlfriend – as far as I knew. Even though I begged her not to, Mom called Patty’s mom and they laughed together over the kitchen phone about our courtship. The shin-kicking eased up, but I rather missed the bruises. Mom said Patty probably liked me well enough but was just fickle. All I could think was fickle rhymed with and reminded me of pickles. I liked pickles, especially the little sweet gherkins. As usual, Mom did not define the new word or offer up a dictionary. 

There were other words like belligerent, incorrigible and insolent that stumped me, though no other grownup I loved used those words describing me. I had a notion of what the word unruly meant. Nine years later when I was driving and Dad was out of the house, on the last day of living with her, Mom threatened to declare me an unruly juvenile according to the Ohio Revised Code, Section 2151.002 – when she was “on strike” and wouldn’t cook, do laundry, or look after my little sister for weeks – wouldn’t allow me do the laundry – when I tried to get out the door with the laundry baskets and detergent – when I shoved her.  (Years later we learned that during Mom’s strike a budding molester down the street attempted to lure my little sister inside his house with candy.)

In the summer I missed Patty terribly. We exchanged letters even though we lived only three miles away. These were brief and repetitive as there wasn’t much to talk about in the dog days of summer and our large loopy handwriting didn’t allow for much elaboration. I wanted her to visit so that I might kiss her under the wild cherry tree in the meadow. I implored Mom and Dad to let me ride my bike down Martinsburg Road, a busy highway, to see her. 

After all, I rode to Gambier to get a haircut once, over that rickety bridge spanning the Kokosing River. It was a very bad haircut – crooked bangs, but I also stopped at the candy store on Wiggins Street and loaded up with Bazooka Bubble Gum and Three Musketeers. But then, maybe that trek occurred when I was ten or eleven. Kenyon College was there in Gambier and my grandmother was a cook at the dining hall for many years serving the long-hair kids from the East Coast. Grandma and Grandpa had a little dairy farm just outside the village where I spent much of my summers. 

My bike was an embarrassment as Dad bought it for me new just before the Sears Spyder and the Schwinn Sting-Ray models with the banana seats and the chopper handlebars came out. Mine was a gearless stylistic remnant of the 1950s – fire engine red with coaster brakes, too much chrome, and whitewall tires for god’s sake. None of the other boys in the neighborhood ever commented on my bike as they were generally polite kids, offspring of professors who taught at the very protestant and very evangelical Nazarene College just down the hill. John Taylor, who played a viola in the orchestra and would become a weather forecaster, had a gold Spyder Mark IV with caliper brakes, a leopard print seat, and a gear-shifter like Steve McQueen’s sportscar. 

I felt somehow that I was just a little less cool and was required to work harder at popularity as I was also Catholic and went to catechism on Sundays rather than Bible school. Their evangelical parents were suspicious of Catholics. No, in actuality, prejudiced. Maybe it was because I knew fewer rules and players’ stats in football – though I liked the Jets and Packers for some reason. Maybe it was because I was the only boy in the neighborhood who knew how to swear properly.

I lost track of Patty after fourth grade as, of course, there were other girlfriends: Brenda, Sherry, Robin, Melanie, Penny, Linda, Barbie. But Patty McCalla was my first obsession, and I was indebted to her for that emotional opportunity, the instantaneity of love, the purity of adoration before the animal desire of adolescence took hold. I am not sure I actually kissed Patty when we were seven – even on the cheek, let alone on the lips. I doubt we fully comprehended the procedure even though there was plenty of kissing on television in the old black and white movies at 4:00 on Big Ten Theater and even on Bewitched and The Brady Bunch. I am fairly certain we held hands a bit until it was no longer practical to do so. After high school, I heard she married Tom’s cousin, Dave Auger, and like everyone else suffered the tragedy of adult life. They had a little girl who ran out onto Sycamore Road.


David Sapp, writer, artist, and professor, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawings titled Drawing Nirvana.

For young people living in the world of adults, “love” is a means of defiance and resistance. Explore with respect to the literary text and any cinematic adaptation of Romeo and Juliet prescribed in your course. 


The frantic pace of the movie reveals the outburst vehemence and impulsive hot-headed nature of the dwelling aboriginal of Verona as latterly foreshadowed by the rage, grief and passion of the feuding rivalries between the adversaries-Capulets and Montagues----true to the authenticity of Shakespearean spirit. 1960s film version was focused on tragic love; the 1990s is about violent love. 

Shakespearean dramatis persona were the milieu of the starcrossed lovers and their inner moral dilemmas of those minds whose temperaments resonate reckless and hasty nature as the dysfunctional world of the Montagues and Capulets whose blood and honour were inseperable. Modern day mise-en-scene of the adaptation is a brilliant spectacle that marvels the accomplishing achievements through bestowal of laurel wreathed bouquets and accolades. For instance, Mercutio’s raving in the Capulet’s ball makes unimpeachable exemplary phenomenon with the bottling of acid beforehand. Romeo’s decision to end his life with poisonous drugs parallels the lifestyle of violence and addiction. The mafia clans fanaticism of religious sentiments as projected by their Catholic vein running through the plot juxtaposes coldblooded aggression as ironically spotlighted by the stereotypical families. 

The close shot camera focusing the Shakespearean hero and heroine cloistered by the walls of Verona and confinement by window frame of patriarchal abode respectively. Upon revealing close up shot Zeffirelli’s camera angle moves to showcase Romeo attired in a deep, lilac; a Montague bereft of Capulet vulgarity and ostentation; nonetheless, pill box hat, eyeliner, flawless complexion and the flower exemplifies effeminacy. “A glooming peace this morning with it brings. The sun for sorrow will not show for his head”-----unshaved, unkempt Romeo beside swollen lips and fluffy faced Juliet in the tomb scene is the visual artifice in commitment to the ironical perspectives of the drama. Zeffirelli’s textual interpretation literally elucidates Shakespeare’s highly stylized and emotionally expressive naturalism that bestows weight to the narrative moments like Juliet’s departure epitomizing overexcitedness and emotional disorientation by the state of the physical dizziness. Here, as throughout, Zeffirelli creates a situation where visibility becomes feeling and feeling becomes awareness. 

Religion of love imagery foreshadowed by the sonnet dialogue is absolutely superbly visualized filmic adaptation to cherish beneath the connotations of pilgrimage and saintliness: institutionalized and ritualized love-making courtship. The starcrossed lovers romantic love-making sonnet in the background depicted by the imageries of saints, pilgrims and statues brings the abstractest essence of martyrdom, canonization and immortality---the fabulous trappings embodying their history---their personalities and their naivetes, and their uncertainty of each other and the awareness of the social context in which they find themselves in the ignorance of perils. Choruses last six lines musical effect is absolutely inappropriate and unnecessary addition to the cinematic conventions of diegesis hovering between snapshots and painting, documentary and fiction; reconciling the present tense with the past tense of the film, ethical space with that of the cinema and history with story as profoundly replicated in Mercutio’s remark to Romeo is appropriately credible to Zeffirelli’s diegetic: “Now art thou what thou art, by art as well as by nature.” 

Further Reading

Sarah L. Lorenz’s “Romeo and Juliet”: The Movie, The English Journal, March 1998, Volume 7, No 3, Teaching the Classics: Old Wine, New Bottles, March 1998, pp. 50-51, National Council of Teachers of English 

Michael Pursell’s Artifice and Authenticity in Zeffirelli’s: “Romeo and Juliet”, Literature and Film Quarterly, 1986, Volume 14, No 4, pp. 173-178, Salisbury University

ten more years
 

remember when your parents

told you they were staying

together for the sake of the

children

 

it was all a lie

 

they hated you and only

stayed together for another

decade because the taxes

were easier to do

 

ten more years of do

what your father says

 

ten more years of

anger and despair

 

ten more years of talking

yourself down from the

roof every other night

 

you still are haunted

by those ten years

 

eventually, time will

run out on all of us

 

not everyone gets

the bliss of a sunset
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
another sign of getting older
 

here comes a

sexy woman

in glasses

 

my knees

just got

weak

 

is it love

 

or fucking

arthritis
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
someone will find the happy out there
 

i was told i never write happy poems

 

some impossible challenges should

just be let go

 

but no

 

i have to do this

 

so, there's this little boy

watching the rain

 

his father tells him

those are tears from

god

 

and the little boy asks

why is god crying

 

and the father tells the

little boy it is because

of all the times he lets

down his mother

 

and the little boy, just

old enough to know his

father is probably full

of shit

 

says maybe it is because

of all the times you have

let her down and she knows

she could have done much

better

 

after taking his beating, the

little boy learned a lasting

knowledge about the truth...

 

it hurts
--------------------------------------------------------------
with all i have to give
 

hot water racing

down your back

 

i can feel your breath

in my soul

 

it feels like i have

waited forever to

taste you

 

to grace your lips with

all i have to give

 

be it this night or all

the nights we have left

 

you possess the only

arms i ever felt safe

within

 

i could promise you

the moon but i'd rather

go hand in hand shooting

the stars

 

walk across a bridge and

jump together

 

to see how much love

can let us fly

 

i want to show the muse

all that she has inspired

me to do

 

one day, hopefully

 

we'll meet in some

random city like it

was meant to be
----------------------------------------------------------
chasing dark secrets
 

the muse is in paradise

trying to enjoy life a

little bit more

 

i'm off chasing dark

secrets

 

wondering if it is only

my tail or a tale worth

telling

 

our love grows stronger

and i long for the day

where there is a lonely

beach and two old souls

enjoying a drink

 

i know the chances

are slim

 

but i refuse to believe

the impossible can't

happen

 

of course, the deeper

the longing the larger

the price to pay in

sorrow and madness


J.J. Campbell (1976 - ?) is old enough to know where the bodies are buried. He's been widely published over the years, most recently at The Rye Whiskey Review, Disturb the Universe Magazine, Horror Sleaze Trash, The Beatnik Cowboy and The Asylum Floor. He will have a joint book coming out this summer with C. Renee Kiser. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)

line up
                                                                                                  
stand on one line to register 
at a clinic showing your card
to see medical staff on duty

sit and wait and wait and wait
until a guy rushes in fast talk
handing you some prescription

stand on a line marked exit 
to pay for the visit where they 
take checks cash or credit 

drive away cautiously sure
never to cross over any
double yellow traffic lines 

stand on winding line at 
drug counter now paying
for an unknown medicine

stand on L O N G line to buy 
something to eat unable 
to decipher nutrition labels  
                     
make sure to line up your 
car when you come home 
carefully keeping it vertical

walk quickly down that 
long line of apartments 
each door mud brown

this shows you follow the 
straight and narrow in this 
personal hell of lines

today’s bottom line is 
minus $220 and a small 
frozen pizza for dinner 


broken dream 

into dream of gray
imprisoned within gray stone

away from fragrant red roses
far from soft green grass

behind gray walls unable
to breathe in air like cement.

can you remember smooth 
oceans or recall falling stars?

imprisoned for too long.
walls begin to crack open

stones knocked over steel bars
crushed walls blasted into bits.

now you can breathe no longer 
enclosed finding this world 

this world lies in front of you 
pulsating alive free 


all the noise
                             
constant chatter of streaming news
death turmoil destruction spaced
with random acts of kindness

togetherness as families reunite
after leaving that COVID expanse
some young unable to walk now

policing and surveillance everywhere
yet vandals continue under
“boys will be boys” becoming men
  
pushing women around grabbing their
genitals blackening eyes burning down
houses cursing those who bring life
                                                           
drugs the great spider web to keep 
workers marching in step AND constant
appeals for donations to politicians

those who claim to be famous
are more infamous than ever
showing off their bling for brains


noon day demon

after police cars careened downtown
sirens screaming across streets
neighborhood schools locked down

after press reporters photographers
combed the vicinity canvassing
live witnesses or local authorities

after the gunman was shot down
but no one could understand his rage
camouflaged by quiet politeness

after helicopters lifted the injured from
wired baskets to trauma centers while
gleaming black bags were carried out

after everyone remarked how bright
blue morning had turned to blood red
afternoon marked by thin yellow tape
                              
after blinking lights ashen faces
cries of distress faded into gray
there was nothing to do but return

to business as usual 


Reservoir

I can no longer separate the poem from that day
both imperfect lonely paraphrasing.

Perhaps you can imagine air dense occasional sun
on face hard brown grass at the reservoir in
New England trees spill their leaves like many hands
falling in despair gulls crying crying at New England
reservoir rippling rippling how old I am becoming
searching still searching.

Too tired embarrassed nude inside why say anything
annoyed amazed at circles with circles diffusion
of leaves rings of water movement of people moving
moving all this moving toward no exact point
only this cluster of conjecture.

LET NOTHING YOU DISMAY


My father’s geographical tendencies were nurtured when he began to walk. His gentle mother’s hands on his small shoulders moved him toward or away from things like a guiding light.  There was a velocity to his knowing where his feet were planted, fast and fastidious, as if nothing else mattered.  

The familiarity of blood meant turbulence in the strictest sense of the word, and gave usable information years and years later. 

Intercessory prayer had us both kneeling at the altar in a church filled to the brim with a visual coding that was second nature to us.  The  cynical among us called it sorcery, or worse.  I had eyes like glass, which magnified what I held in the stillborn heart I was born with. I dictated to my father everything I saw. When a murder of crows softly cooed in my general vicinity, I thought of how transitory comfort is to all living things. Here one day, gone the next.  

My father stood back, crossed his arms in front of him and I knew he feared it was an omen because geography aside, we were a superstitious people, given to signs and symbols, and robed in the inflected dialect we held so close, despite the years.  When my father turned from me I pushed away the urge to guide him. We can read each other like a book, but it doesn’t mean we have to.  

Answers to prayers are eventually bestowed.  We hold patience, above all, in pockets where we will dip our hands for reassurance. All in good time.  All in good time.


Michelle Reale is the author of several poetry and flash collections, including Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press, 2019) , Blood Memory (Idea Press), and In the Year of Hurricane Agnes (Alien Buddha Press).  She is the Founding and Managing Editor for both OVUNQUE SIAMO: New Italian-American Writing and The Red Fern Review. She teaches poetry in the MFA program at Arcadia University.