Three Poems by John Grochalski

bad luck spot
 
one guy is drawing a flower
crushing green and yellow chalk on the pavement
 
watching him
we walk through a chalk sign that says
 
bad luck spot
 
we have to go back, i tell my wife
you have to walk through it backwards
 
why? she asks
 
to undo the curse, of course
 
she says, when did you become so superstitious?
 
when they found cancer
in my thirty-seven year old wife’s breast, i tell her
 
we stop walking
we watch as the man crushes more chalk for his flower
 
in the most basic sense he’s destroying something
in order to create beauty
 
in my way i’m trying to take a nightmare back
 
i didn’t believe that could happen, i continue
who in the hell knows what else i’m wrong about?
jesus? unicorns? ghosts?
compassionate conservatism?  american exceptionalism?
 
you really want me
to walk backwards through that? my wife says
 
we’ve enough bad luck for one lifetime, i say
it’s time for the tides to turn
 
my wife looks around
 
union square is packed 
with the assorted mix of everyone
who make me want to move away from
and fall in love with new york city every day
 
this is stupid, she says
 
so is cancer, i tell her
 
we walk back to the spot on the pavement
some people are walking right through the bad luck spot
and others are walking around it
 
the guy drawing the flower takes a break
to wipe the crushed chalk from off of his hands
 
he’s watching everyone
i wonder if he wrote this sign too
 
i’m only doing this for you, my wife says
 
then she starts walking backward through the bad luck spot
laughing like a child with the sun behind her
 
and i can feel the magic working
 
as i stand there smiling
counting all of our old blessings
 
delivered by this alchemy at work






charles bridge
 
at times
i try to hold you out of my heart
 
you’re too heavy for it, baby
 
at times
i think of the years
that have passed between us
 
and then
to save my composure
 
i don’t
 
believe it or not
i like the simple things
 
ice cream
cold beer
the sun in its early moments
 
your hand
as we cross the charles bridge
 
fooling them all
we’re unburdened.





​ 
driving through pittsburgh in june
 
heading back to the suburbs
to my parent’s home
 
from kris and anna’s place
where there was beer and poet talk
 
driving through pittsburgh in june
 
you and i
like we used to do all of the time
 
when we lived there
when it was home 
 
all of those many years ago
 
three days before the doctors in brooklyn
would find the cancer in your breast
 
i wish maybe we’d taken it slower
not been in such a hurry to go back to my parent’s
 
maybe gone around to some of the old places
that we used to hang out
 
the streets that we’d filled with love
and a lot of other things
 
instead of me having you make wrong turns
because i no longer really knew the city of my birth
 
we could’ve had a late bite 
at that old chinese restaurant 
that we hated and loved so much
 
lingered outside your old apartment
the way i did right before our first date
 
done something starry-eyed in the city 
where our romance bloomed then turned solid
 
oh honeybee
if only we had known



​

 Bio: John Grochalski is the author of The Noose Doesn’t Get Any Looser After You Punch Out (Six Gallery Press 2008), Glass City (Low Ghost Press, 2010), In The Year of Everything Dying (Camel Saloon, 2012), Starting with the Last Name Grochalski (Coleridge Street Books, 2014), and the novels, The Librarian (Six Gallery Press 2013), and Wine Clerk (Six Gallery Press 2016).  Grochalski currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where the garbage can smell like roses if you wish on it hard enough.

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