Poetry by Chris Vola

                          Ross Griff CC



morningside heights 

Laughing, we call a bodega beer
against your throat 
a headstone’s promise. 

A mutiny, the decaying causeway
of your back 
erased of all hardness. 

The rooftop, the river, 
your hair, 
my underbelly. 




told me to take a picture of it

Our summers were idyllic. Maybe that makes us weird. The parents? They were tolerable, very few interruptions. There were, of course, the occasional brief, hushed spats of two grizzled souls forced together by choice for three-plus decades. You know, the old “I’ve thought about gangbanging your mouth, who hasn’t?” or “That pogrom was a nice change of pace from our usual routine.” This was the nineties, remember. Nothing pleased my mother more than the joy of salvage after a cataclysmic domestic happening. Fires. Tornados. Skidmarks on the toilet seat. Spoiled dumplings. She needed to be, in one moment, destruction & restoration. My father tried to explain it. “Her family has good teeth,” he said one muggy night while frying up some catfish on the grill. He was so fat that he’d forgotten that my brother probably wasn’t his. That night, our bellies swimming in Play Doh & our livers singed by so many Flintstones vitamins, my other imaginary siblings & I contemplated how filthy Christ’s pubes must have been.

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Chris Vola is the author of six books. His poems appear in New Pop Lit, Psychic Meatloaf, Clutching at Straws, Deadly Chaps Press, and elsewhere. He writes and bartends in New York. 

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