PQ Poem Archives - Pittsburgh Quarterly

A Moment

While chops sizzle and onions brown,the radio intones failures, floods, and fires,and the family cries its needs, Step out the kitchen doorTrain your eyes on the clouds, rumpled on the darkening sky How big are they, you wonder, and where is that cicada with its kazoo, and the bees that all day probed the flowers? How far is …

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Culture PQ Poem

Homewood Poem

by Doralee Brooks

Stranahan, steepest hill in Homewood, pulls my primary-school bones like iron filings across an etch-a-sketch from Belmar at the top to flat Apple Street running across its base near 7101, Mystery Manor. Bought by Woogie Harris, the gangster banker, in the 30’s. In rabbit fur maxi-coats, chinchilla-draped shoulders, jewel-studded t-straps, and wingtips, people stepped from …

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Culture PQ Poem

February Night

by Ralph Culver

—for Hil Winter rain drummingthe pond ice beyond the gate.One light burns overthe stove, bright enough that hecan make out the easy drift of her hip slopinginto the turned-down blanket.The warm length of her.The warm length of heragainst him. Cold rains. He feeds the fire.

Culture PQ Poem

When Life Could Be a Dream

by Andrena Zawinski

When American Bandstand dancersin Philly skipped across our TV screenson the pony, hip swiveled to the twist,jumped up and back in the locomotion,our Platter Pushin’ Papa in Pittsburgh’sroller arenas and high school gyms spun usonto slick dance floors for slow grindsto doo-wop love crush melodies highon falsetto and low blow of saxophone.Sent us us out on …

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PQ Poem

Poem Ending With a Line from Tomas Tranströmer (via Robin Robertson)

by John Repp

Oh to be veeringalong Baum Boulevardto the beatus via north,where the squalls of Mercer vanish for a minute, horizon a violet knife-cut, curtainof snow throbbingat the grade’s bottom—none of which you’ll know, my dear,no matter how loudthe ringing tambourines of ice.

Culture PQ Poem

Colonial Tea Room

by Catherine Doty

At 5 AM you’re buttering the bagels and waiting for your city sewer man to heave himself out of a hole in Barclay Street and bring you a breakfast order for his crew. The list is smudged and long and flush with desire: burned bacon on a jelly-smeared bialy, cold brisket on a kaiser, side of gravy, and Flop …

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PQ Poem

Essential Worker

by Robert Fillman

There was only one blackemployee at our school,Danny the janitor who cleaned up the crumbs fromour Little Debbie cakesat lunch. Danny, who scrubbed the toilets, the muscled thirty-something guy whobecame our protector, who broke up playground fightsand chased down basketballs,raised us up so we could dunk on a ten-foot rim.Danny, whose closet was by the library where …

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Culture PQ Poem

Freight: Passing Through

by Dora Odarenko

I resonate over banks of the Ohio cense with soot the river straitjacketed between walls built for restraint. I cast my voice out over Neville Island intertwine with suspect air. In haste and power I slice with authority the boredom of the highway, its hum a faucet left unchecked. A presence inescapable, I penetrate the …

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Culture PQ Poem

A Parent’s Shame

by Jessica Whipple

She grips a chunk of chalk in her fistscratches onto black construction paperfamiliar fury of scribbles:a moon todayyesterday, an egg someone’s headside by side, two are apples. Sometimesthe picture isn’t the pointit’s powder on palmswows and ooohs and beautifulsfingers and focus and finishingit’s preschool prideit’s fine-motor joy neither of us realizingshe’s tall enough nowto see into …

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PQ Poem

Fern Hollow Bridge

by Arlene Weiner

The high bridge carries a roadway out of town,an earlier generation’s pride and wonder,emblem of man’s ambition. From belowon the park path, it’s an iron rainbow, a sky that booms with ungiving thunder above a shallow stream that gave no graceto the promising son who did himself to deathchoosing to break himself on the dusty path. …

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Culture PQ Poem

Full Moon, Occ Health

by Katy Giebenhain

By the time he reaches Occupational Health the security officer tips his head, says Full moon. You can tell. In the bright sting of winter and vaccine pod fender-bendersglass doors on this edge of hospital campus part and shut, part and shut. Last week a diamond earing went missing.With a distraught patient Iduck-walked the foyer, examined elevator tracks, feltbehind parked wheelchairs and the …

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PQ Poem

After A Pitcher of Beer at Antlers Pub, I Believed I Was Brave

by Lori Jakiela

After A Pitcher of Beer at Antlers Pub, I Believed I Was Brave And walked with my friend Mike to the State Street Pier. Mike was funny, a good drinking buddy, and fearless. He pissed from the edge of the pier, then pole vaulted over the railing and landed hard with both feet, right on the lake below. …

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PQ Poem

Even So

by Richard St. John

Even So My friend wants to be a tree that’s blazing out its autumn so when it’s done, its reds and golds, oranges and browns –lie sudden all around. Outside, chill wind. Trees beyond the strip-mall – bare and thin. I pass a huge, unbalanced ginkgo,leftward branches absent from a winter storm, then grasp the frost-tinged handrailof my front …

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PQ Poem

In the Used To Time

by Nancy Krygowski

There was a guy who’d sing his way to work, walking on the path I’d bike down, and he’d sing at the top of his lungs, and sometimes he’d close his eyes and sometimes he’d throw his arms up and sometimes he’d do a little sway and snap of the fingers and the string bag …

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PQ Poem

Your 8th Birthday

by Marcus Whalbring

To Lucas I forget the comet’s name I looked for all night but never found. You slept in the tent while I kept the fire going, hoping an arrow of light and dust might pierce the air so I could stir you from your coma and show you. We could’ve seen crumbs of ice dissolving …

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PQ Poem

You in the Mountains

by Richelle Buccilli

We ate thick waffles glazed with sugar, our tongues tasting the last of it from our lips, and the sky ran a pink river through its middle behind the trees growing black with each new firefly. Now, the plants in their clay pots disappeared into dusk. The red ashtray left with its pile of Marlboro …

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PQ Poem

June 15, 2017

by Rachel Mennies

I imagine you feeling the heat on your shoulder as you leave your apartment. Maybe you touch the spot where the sun warms you: two inches above and to the left of your clavicle. My neighbors planted their tulips in March—I don’t know why I didn’t tell you—and this week the buds opened wide, became …

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PQ Poem

Necessary City

by Emily Mohn-Slate

I’m walking in hard rain in East Liberty no umbrella keeping direction bythe Cathedral rising over the roofs of this city I swore I’d never live in. Nico and Kai shopin Giant Eagle. I know he’s taking good care of him probably making him laugh feeding himcheerios. I could leave get in my car and …

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PQ Poem

Intersections: Poetry, Photography and Pittsburgh

by Joan E. Bauer & Michael Parillo

In a 2006 lecture at Scripps College, art critic and L.A. Times reviewer Leah Ollman spoke on the overlapping aesthetic qualities used in photography and poetry, stating that “Each has a multiplicitous nature, and like any medium, resists a singular definition. Photography is said to be a slice of reality, a distortion of reality; a …

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PQ Poem

For the Small Hairs on My Ears

by Jeff Oaks

If I am turning wolf-like, a wolflight growing up within me now, how past fifty feels, fur just waiting to bristle, thistle, thorns, an urge to sleep at noon, pace the house all night, staring out through glass at strangers coming back from nearby bars— If I’m becoming something else, listening at the crack in …

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PQ Poem

Perfection

by Richard Gegick

Driving Rt. 48 I see the Lokay Lanes sign celebrating a 300 game and I am filled with longing. Never have I done anything the best it can be done; the feat must feel like the first big winter snow where new lovers shut themselves indoors stay in bed while white piles in inches on …

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PQ Poem

First Grill

by Joshua Martin

Overused, grates still crusted with trimmings, it wasn’t much but a dented Weber picked up at a yard sale north of Jackson, a yard I remember because there were children’s books scattered in the weeds and dolls missing their legs but no one around my age, and though for fifteen cents you could take home …

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