Marc Alan Di Martino

“We live in the flicker.”
-after a line from Joseph Conrad

We live in the flicker
each fugitive wick a blur

less real than the last, each
indeterminate gasp a
vowel perched at the mouth of the
ear. I don’t know what deed

I did to deserve this
nearness, this bliss.

There are things that undo knowing:
hows & whys, electrons snowing
eerily beyond one’s grasp.

Further on the ocean, its spliced iris
leopard-spotted with masts,
inches closer. Is it a wishbone
clenched in your fist, or a skeleton
key pounded from spite?
Enter the unmarked grave
riddled with light.

Big Full Moon

Tonight our window frames
a moon the size of a quarter,
George Washington’s face
shining soberly back at us.
Behind him, in the distance,
too far for a human brain
to contemplate, the luscious
starry fruits beamed down
from telescopes more powerful
than gods: butterfly-winged
nebulae, amoeba-shaped galaxies
torqued by gravity’s muscle,
sombreros, pinwheels sequined
and spinning, jewelled piñatas
scattering bright blue candies
across eternity – immaculate
snapshots no human eye had ever
seen or philosophy dreamed of
before. Does our insignificance
terrify? My wife inquires why
I care what happens on Jupiter
while here on planet Earth
everything is broken, and I
look at her speechless because
for once I can’t defend
poetry in the face of logic
or anything else & of course,
as always, she’s right.

Marc Alan Di Martino is the author of the collections Still Life with City (Pski’s Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Palette Poetry, Rattle, Rust + Moth, Tinderbox, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and many other journals and anthologies. His work has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Currently a reader for the Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.

Back to Main Loch Raven Review Site

Marc Alan Di Martino’s Still Life With City, Reviewed by Dan Cuddy

Marc Alan Di Martino, Still Life With City, Pski’s Porch Publishing 2021, ISBN-13: 978-1-948920-23-0, 86 pages

Marc Alan Di Martino’s book Still Life With City is personal, almost memoir-like, but he characterizes it as “a work of imagination.” It, as he says, took him “twenty years” to write. I would call it both memoir and creative fiction. The book is thoroughly “poetry.” Di Martino plays the chords of language and creates electric narratives and descriptions. The City is not just one city in which Di Martino has lived, it is a number of them, though New York is a leading metropolis. In fact, the book begins with New York punk rock, a cultural influence.

The first section of the book called “Bootleg” consists of three poems. The first is called “Live in Dallas” about a Lou Reed concert in Dallas Texas. It doesn’t hurt to pull up a Reed recording & listen, and then start into the poetry of the poem. You get the experience, the conflict:

……….Lou’s banter subverts expectation, Frets
……….of his Country Gentleman crackle and fizz
……….in fits and starts. Drums thump gorilla time.
……….“Is that a guy or girl?” some locals quip.
……….The band steamrolls into its opener.
……….You can hear the beer bottles clank. Demure.

……….Desoxyn-buzzed, impish, a smidgen fey,
……….the singer short and stocky in dark Ray Bans,
……….paisley-patterned shirt and Jewfro halo
……….plays Lenny Bruce straight man to Longhorn steer.
……….“Does anyone here have school tomorrow?”
……….he prods, feigning motherly concern.

……….“He shitting us?” Mugs mill around the stage.
……….Lou reaches out with an impromptu shriptz
……….about their’ Cowboys—as if this New York vamp
……….knew shit from pigskin—softening them up,
……….then cracks a nut of street philosophy
……….atop their skulls: You should give other people

……….just a little chance—in football anyway.
……….Bewilderment. Just then the music tears
……….the curtain back, staggering along
……….staccato as the Lexington IRT,
……….a swaggering yarn of scoring heroin
……….uptown, Lonestar boys, out of their endzone,

…………..

The poem goes on for 6 more stanzas of exceptional writing. Though there is only one Shakespeare, Di Martino’s use of both the vernacular and a wide-ranging learned vocabulary, and the harmonious use of Assonance, remind me of the bard. The language is anything but flat American, though denotation never suffers at this poet’s hand.

The next two poems are titled “The Voidoids Play CBGB, Late 77” and” Verlaine Among the Stars”. What do those titles mean? Wikipedia says

CBGB was a New York City music club that opened in 1973 in Manhattan’s East Village. It was a biker bar and then a dive bar, before becoming a home for punk rock and new wave. The letters CBGB stood for Country, Bluegrass, and Blues, It became famous for the new genres, which included bands like the Ramones, Television, Patti Smith Group, Blondie, and Talking Heads. From the early 1980s onward, CBGB was known for hardcore punk.

The Verlaine in the second title refers both to the French poet and to Tom Verlaine, the songwriter, singer, and guitarist frontman for the New York City rock band Television.

Though some people may be familiar with the history of punk rock, others may not be. The point is allusions and unfamiliar names can be easily accessed these days in the age of the internet. Readers should explore the denotations and connotations of poems. It isn’t that difficult to track references down. Little masterpieces, like these 3 Di Martino poems open up even more. Already the language, the very surface of sound and meanings work magic on the ear and in the brain. The best poems of this poet are very, very good.

Section 2 is titled “The City” Check out this magnificent imagistic opening to the poem “From a Greyhound”:

……….Those jagged shapes drew pictures on the sky—
……….fabulous fictions: bridges, skyscrapers,
……….toy building blocks arranged by alien hands,
……….a city of ants far off in the distance.
……….The Greyhound ducked and swerved the Jersey swamps
……….until we’d left the last grasslands behind
……….and entered Dis: a hell of factories,
……….smokestacks angry as fire-breathing dragons
……….roaring their poison clouds into the blue.
……….The heart beat nervous in anticipation
……….of coming attractions, airless tunnels
……….to be waded through, sheer ton walls of quartz
……….and glass erected on the other shore
……….like some faint futuristic Camelot.

This section takes the reader on a tour of the poet’s personal New York. So many good poems. Some highlights in my opinion: “Crawlspace”, “Lush Life”, “Open Mic Night” and definitely “New Year’s Morning in Mystic Connecticut”, which begins:

……….I wake up lipstick-smeared in someone’s bed.
……….Black coffee bites my tongue, still stung with wine,
……….flows down the broken throttle of my throat;
……….its acid slithers through my small intestine.
……….I crouch in the kaleidoscopic dawn
……….an animal, afraid to move, still drunk.
……….I look around at what must be the room
……….of a kid brother—but whose house is this?
……….Which kingdom have I woken up in? Snow
……….twinkles on the windowsill while outside
……….cars sit parked like patient lemon drops
……….sprinkled with powdered sugar. Lollipops
……….are STOP and YIELD and CHILDREN AT PLAY signs
……….along the street. This must be Candyland.

Section 3 is a 4-page poem about memory and writing and being receptive to life. A few gems of wisdom in this poem are “What you live today you’ll write tomorrow.”

……….‘Nothing seems less real than an empty train station
……….just before dawn, the city asleep, when not even the sun
……….has lifted its heavy eye from beyond the rooftops.”

……….‘I let noises approach me from the street
……….through the open window, cascade over me
……….like rays of light on a solitary plant.”

Section 4, the last section is filled with poems called Epiphanies. These poems are about assorted subjects, mostly about the poet’s later life in Perugia, Italy, married with children. Though there are many noteworthy poems in Epiphanies, a couple of poems struck me. “Transubstantiation” and “What Happened at the Baptism” relate the conflict of religions. He was raised Jewish, but his paternal relatives were Italian Catholics. The narratives about his relationship with his Italian aunt, who never forgot that he was Jewish, did forget that Jesus and Mary were Jewish, a not insignificant fact in the foundation of Christianity. The aunt, was also hypocritical in that she wasn’t in good standing with the Church in that she was living with a married man. Could tolerance and lack of understanding of human values be a rare value in the practical exercise of religion? I remember a priest at Saint Philip & James twenty years ago warning against those who used religion as a weapon. These poems illustrate that warning. Reading these poems is instructive. The poet’s aunt played the role of the Grand Inquisitor in his life. She was “pious, self-appointed, terrifying.”

Another poem, interesting for a different reason, is “Elegy on Via Giulia.” The poem is an elegy for a Robert Viscusi. Who was he? Look him up on Wikipedia. The poem gives its information but the Wikipedia gives him the prosaic context of his life & a photo. These footnotes are just that—footnotes. Sometimes they illuminate; other times they just move the flashlight beam. Can we have too much information? Not if you are curious. Also, Viscusi was an Italian American writer whom Di Martino admired as a person as well as a teacher.

In Di Martino’s book, the Viscusi elegy is the next to the last poem of the book. The last poem is titled “Time Traveler.” It is a fit ending to a poetic memoir, a very personal book.

……….You grew and grew until you stopped growing
……….and there they planted a tree to mark your height
……….existence measured in feet and inches
……….infancy meted out with a yardstick.

……….When you were tall enough, you walked away forever,
……….returning only for a holiday or a wedding
……….but soon not even those. You lost track of the tree
……….standing alone in the yard, an orchard of one.

……….Then everyone else walked away too. House and garden
……….belong to others now. The cemetery
……….is still there at the end of the road, beyond the curve
……….(the dead don’t walk away so easily)

……….near the communal gardens, cramped and overgrown.
……….Occasionally, you still pass by. Between the pines
……….Your father planted, you spy on other lives

……….unfolding as yours once did. Smiling you wave.
……….They wave back, welcoming you to their home.

Marc Alan Di Martino is a Pushcart-nominated poet, translator, and author of the collection Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His work appears in Baltimore Review, Rattle, Rust + Moth, Tinderbox, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and many other journals and anthologies. His second collection, Still Life with City, will be published by Pski’s Porch in 2021. He lives in Italy.

Dan Cuddy was previously a contributing editor with the Maryland Poetry Review and with Lite: Baltimore’s Literary Newspaper. He has been published in many small magazines over the years, such as NEBO, Antioch Review, and Connecticut River Review. In 2003, his book of poems, Handprint On The Window, was published by Three Conditions Press.

Back to Main Loch Raven Review Site

Marc Alan Di Martino

Darkrooms

It’s all a matter of focus, f-stop.
In high school photography class
we’d stand for hours in darkrooms
hands swirling the chemical vats,
summoning ghosts. Infrared
bulbs hung from the ceiling
and the door had a porthole
like a submarine. Inside
we wore protective goggles,
white smocks stained with Kool-Aid-
red developer. We’d hang
our photographs to dry, and the next day
usher them out into the officious
blaze of the classroom for critique.
I liked hiding in there, making friends
with darkness. It helped me prepare
for much darker rooms that would come later.

Father’s Day

My daughter reminds me it’s Father’s Day
here in Italy. She says, “I’ll bake you a cake
with mom. Or maybe make a tiramisù.”

“I’d like that,” I say. And I can’t remember
the last time I celebrated Father’s Day
with my own father. I was so young.

He was so young.

Marc Alan Di Martino is a Pushcart-nominated poet, translator and author of the collection Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His work appears in Baltimore Review, Rattle, Rust + Moth, Tinderbox, Valparaiso Poetry Review and many other journals and anthologies. His second collection, Still Life with City, will be published by Pski’s Porch in 2021. He lives in Italy.

Back to Main Loch Raven Review Site

Marc Alan Di Martino

Hit & Run

What happened on that Sunday afternoon
to make instinct suddenly kick in
transform her from stick-in-the-mouth
happy-go-lucky lab to timber wolf
in a heartbeat? When the vet pronounced her dead
from internal bleeding, my mother said
“That’s it. I’ll never have another dog
as long as I live.” And for thirty-two years
she kept her promise. She’d never run
so wild before, oblivious to shouts and whistles
pursuing her vanishing shape. Hours passed
and we assumed she’d find her way back home
eventually—but then the phone rang
at dinnertime, gently informing us
Sasha had been hit by a car and lay
at the intersection of York and Padonia roads,
her ribcage crushed. To make things even worse
it was a hit-and-run. We left the food
half-warm on the table and hurried out.
The road was only half a mile away—
minutes by car—but it was a thoroughfare
and traffic still intense as we approached
the scene of the accident. She lay wrapped
in a blanket, panting heavily, hanging on,
eyes an apologetic shade of brown
every last trace of wolfishness erased
from her guileless face. I leaned over
and stroked her soft comforting velvet ears,
still perky with life. As they lifted her
into the ambulance, I took her side
and kissed her coat until her world went black.

Lutherville

We spent the summers at our doomed skatepark
scraping our egos, learning to fly
over ragged decks stacked twenty inches high
slamming on the hard cement
of a repurposed basketball court
knees swelling with pus and pain
as we pushed past miles
of suburban sprawl ‒ hellbent,
wheels clacking over slabs of sidewalk
shades of Sahara, gas station after
gas station after gas station
abandoned and reclaimed
by imagination. We’d grind
blocks perilous with motor oil, slide
rails erected for the disabled.
Chaos announced us to pedestrians
darting this way and that
like fish before an encroaching menace.

Our stomping grounds were asphalt parking lots
with slick red curbs marked BUS or FIRE LANE,
shopping malls rich with skate shops, walls ablaze
with dragon skulls and horrored talismans
of prepubescent ire. “Skate and Destroy”
admonished stickers on our tattered boards
t-shirts screaming out metallic logos
of our favorite bands. We were misfits
in the public eye, our passion punishable
by law. Lutherville was the one place
they gave us ‒ or we took from them
depending whom you ask. We’d flirt with girls
hair jubilant as fire-licked Easter eggs
crosslegged on the chained-up picnic table
graffitiing its snarled wooden eyes
with magic marker, heads bobbing in time
to punk rock on a portable tape deck.

………………………..*

Then one day, just like that, it closed.
A city ordinance proclaimed the park—
the only one in a hundred miles of us—
a safety hazard, its gates padlocked
and openings promptly slashed
in the chain-link fence
for clandestine entry. From that day on
we skated with the throb of lawlessness
inside our hearts, till overnight
the whole dream finally dissolved

the ramps we’d hammered into shape
with our bare hands dismantled, trashed,
as the basketball players returned
to rightful ownership of their court
and we to repossession of the streets.

Speed Freak

“Daredevil skateboarder Pablo Ramirez killed by dump truck on Seventh Street in SoMa.”
– San Francisco Chronicle, April 23, 2019

Any one of us might have died that day
blindsided by a backtracking dump truck
at 60 mph on a downhill rampage
for the cameras. It was bound to happen,
newsfeeds snickered over morning coffee
feeding the grist of another bad day
in skateboarding. They’re crazy, anyway.

Death must be corkscrewed into our genes,
ensnared in our DNA. What else makes
a person leap a car, then bomb a hill
in a city built like a rollercoaster
past indifferent intersections, traffic lights
regulating all but one’s booming pulse?

The papers said he came to San Francisco
from New York City, on the trail of speed.
A drug, yes, but it’s not necessary
to snort it, shoot it, manufacture it.
It’s right there in plain sight—four urethane wheels
strapped to a maple deck.
………………………………………….You find a hill
like the gentle one snaking down my street
drawing a gravelly S-curve of asphalt
before my bedroom window, hold your breath
and go—the rest is in the capricious hands
of Fate. I’d jump off in the grass, tumble
like a football player, head tucked, shoulder arced
to the ground, get up and walk back up
to where I’d come from, the crest of the hill
at the cemetery gate. I’d scan for cars
before the rubber of my soles left Earth
and coasting I’d begin to taste the wind
inside my mouth. Slowly carving, sliding
to modulate my speed, calculating
a thousand data sets unconsciously
my adolescent brain a supercomputer
engaged in saving my body from disaster.

I’d pass Mr. Leland in the driveway
washing his lime-green Corvette for the tenth
time that year. He’d wave as I sped by
heading down the most treacherous stretch
of road in my suburban neighborhood.

I’d spy the cars a hundred feet ahead—
the Volvos, Chevys, hatchbacks and sedans
approaching my foreshortened field of vision
and think: these will be my undertakers.
Just then, I’d say a little godless prayer
and veer off into the last flowerbeds
of my neighbors’ yards, upturn the topsoil
then stare out into traffic, holding myself,
shaking—ready to do it all again.

With Our Bare Hands

We were strong then. We were makers of worlds.
-Matt Hohner

Our ramp went up in an abandoned field
between my old elementary school
and the newly-minted public library.
Wedged in among the weeds, a screen of trees
protected it from polite indiscretions
of busybody neighbors, bored police,
and county board members in off-hours.
What wood we could we stole—the rest we bought
with money earned from mowing local lawns
on Saturdays, Air Jordans stained grass-green
from mulch, pounding back the Gatorade
the volume on our Walkmans deafening
against the lawnmowers’ pastoral roar.

At fifteen, the fundamentals of carpentry
ran in our blood—keen eyes surveyed the land
for scraps of metal coping, 2x4s,
whatever patched a hole or scratched the itch
inside our souls. We were industrious
and rarely bored, constantly tinkering,
sawing, planing, drilling, hammering,
our backyards more like Nantucket shipyards
or the Tower of Babel nudging heaven
in rickety glory than what they were:
a social experiment. Parentless teens
armed to the teeth with deadly power tools
didn’t revert to monsters like Jack and Piggy
but set themselves goals and completed tasks
as if they were stipended office hacks.
Ramps sprang up everywhere: in cul-de-sacs,
backwoods, at the dead-ends of dead-end streets,
in rural hamlets teeming with horse farms
and sleepy cattle grazing under clouds
every one of them built by hands like ours—

hands that on other bodies packed switchblades,
shot heroin. Some were our classmates, peers
snatched from sycamore-clad suburban homes
by alien fingers, vaporous nemeses
that seeped in through open summer windows
and siphoned life from them one by one by one.
My closest friend would slip a makeshift noose
around his neck in a Baltimore jail cell
sick of the getting clean, the relapsing,
the sisyphean tasks and fool’s errands,
the 12-step programs amounting to dust.
Last time I saw him, he’d gone purple,
his face bloated, a mop of sandy hair
over one eye like a strung-out Beach Boy.

………………………………*

My father died that winter. By mid-spring
I was back at the ramp working up lines
smacking my lip tricks with an added crack
of anger. Life had veered off the rails. My grades
suffered the shock. Skating was all there was
to hold, but could I make myself believe
in its fuzzy logic of transitions,
its dogmas of asphalt, its stone-hard promises
of polyurethane? What was to be done
with wild orphans of godless parentage
spinning 360 flips in parking lots
of churches while worshippers bent over pews
psalter-in-hand, passing around the hat
for alms? We were a most unholy crew
of argonauts, scraping by on thin wits
driven half-mad by an unconscious quest
for air, the ethereal thrill of flight

as if, like fallen Icarus, we might
flirt with the gods just long enough to singe
our wooden wings, then perish in the sun.

Marc Alan Di Martino is a two-time Pushcart-nominated poet and author of the collection Unburial (Kelsay Books, 2019). His work appears in Rattle, Baltimore Review, Palette Poetry, Rivet Journal and many other places, including the anthologies Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take Up the Knife (Kingly Street Press, 2019) and What Remains: The Many Ways We Say Goodbye (Gelles-Cole, 2019). His second collection, Still Life with City, is forthcoming from Pski’s Porch in 2020. He lives in Italy with his family.

Back to Main Loch Raven Review Site

Marc Alan Di Martino

Heaven

The day the brakes failed on my father’s car
we should have died. What did I know of life
at eight years-old? In nineteen-eighty-two

the roads weren’t equipped with guardrails yet
and rain drenched the swerve of asphalt
above the reservoir as our tiny

Fiat gripped the curve and my father’s foot
fumbled at the pedals. Out of the blue, leaves
lodged in my eyes, and I felt the absurd

thrill of flight – acrobats on a trapeze –
forgetful that we were three mammals trapped
in a moving vehicle crashing through trees.

The patient water lapped the muddy bank
dozens of yards below. Like a tin spaceship
we hit the earth, struck down by sycamores

that caught our car as on a spider’s thread
before it plummeted past underbrush
and downward to the waiting reservoir.

My father split the windshield with his boot –
gave three hard kicks and the safety glass thatched
like an eggshell. He sent me scurrying up

to flag down help. From the blasted shoulder
our totaled Fiat was a soda can
crushed by an ogre’s foot, tossed carelessly

into the woods, an afterthought. Alone,
I waved down motorists, shrieking and pointing,
convinced I was a ghost until one stopped

while dad disentangled our dog from the wreck
and scrambled up to meet me in the sun.
“We must be dead,” I told myself, “and this

is heaven.”

Author’s Note: This poem describes a real car accident I was in with my father in 1982, when I was eight years old. The accident took place on a stretch of Warren Rd. as it exits Cockeysville and skirts the water before arriving at the bridge. We were going camping, it was raining, and the brakes failed. Next thing we knew we were free-falling towards the water. The car fell until it came to a stop between two large trees. Below was the reservoir. No seatbelts, no injuries. I haven’t been down that road since the early 1990s, when I still lived in the area. The poem is included in my first collection Unburial.

Marc Alan Di Martino‘s work has appeared in Rattle, the New Yorker, Baltimore Review, Palette Poetry and many other places, and is forthcoming in the anthologies Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take Up the Knife and What Remains: The Many Ways We Say Goodbye. His first collection, Unburial, will be published in 2020 by Kelsay Books. He currently lives in Perugia, Italy with his family where he works as a teacher and translator. Visit his website, marcalandimartino.com.

Back to Main Loch Raven Review Site