As the century turned toward America
Danilo Gallo traveled alone age twelve
from a peasant house near Naples steerage
to New York knowing no one, knowing
no English, knowing nothing save the need
to earn with quick wit, quicker hands, feet
quick enough to escape the grasps of cops
and mobs. He applied himself when wops
were needed not to apply to whiter men
wherever he looked.
After five years he sent for his parents
and little Rosa and Rocco to join him
in the flat behind the haberdashery shop
he ran in the lower East Side tenement
and soon owned without loans from friend,
bank or shark. Each hat, each lease led
to other shops and taller buildings
and the filling stations across the river
in Queens near the apartment house where
the newly-wedded Americans Daniel now
and Mildred gave life to Josephine and William,
Teresa, my mother, and Dan, Andy and Lucille,
last born, last holding the family fortune, last
breathing fire from her nonagenarian mouth
and eyes applied against them who take she says
the country her father had found on the streets
right out of her diamond-ringed and perfectly
manicured hands.
Danilo Gallo traveled alone age twelve
from a peasant house near Naples steerage
to New York knowing no one, knowing
no English, knowing nothing save the need
to earn with quick wit, quicker hands, feet
quick enough to escape the grasps of cops
and mobs. He applied himself when wops
were needed not to apply to whiter men
wherever he looked.
After five years he sent for his parents
and little Rosa and Rocco to join him
in the flat behind the haberdashery shop
he ran in the lower East Side tenement
and soon owned without loans from friend,
bank or shark. Each hat, each lease led
to other shops and taller buildings
and the filling stations across the river
in Queens near the apartment house where
the newly-wedded Americans Daniel now
and Mildred gave life to Josephine and William,
Teresa, my mother, and Dan, Andy and Lucille,
last born, last holding the family fortune, last
breathing fire from her nonagenarian mouth
and eyes applied against them who take she says
the country her father had found on the streets
right out of her diamond-ringed and perfectly
manicured hands.
A native New Yorker, James Penha has lived for the past quarter-century in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his LGBT speculative story “Leaves,” also set in Indonesia, was a finalist for the Saints and Sinners Short Fiction Contest and so appears in the Saint & Sinners Literary Festival 2017 anthology. His essay "It's Been a Long Time Coming" was featured in The New York Times "Modern Love" column in April 2016. Penha edits TheNewVerse.News, an online journal of current-events poetry. @JamesPenha
