New Straightsville, Sunday October 17   

Jason Baldinger

Sunday morning

God’s garden

     Fall hangs like moonlight

over trees, full color

Mexicali Jesus, Wild Irish Rose

     & a temperamental power steering pump

got nothing to say

to the Black Diamond region

open, stretched out

     history on back roads

     history written in scars

on landscape, only read

like Braille in an Ariel shot

gears grind away ghosts

     reality enamel thin

iron works, brick kilns

the reverend chain smoking black

     asphalt, grey asphalt trace

winding from Eclipse to Candytown

     to New Pittsburg, to Jobs

onto New Straitsville, where dogs

chase ATVs down Main street

where lunch counters fell from

     Pez Dispensers fashioned to look like

     the death mask of Samuel Gompers

                         in 1933.

Sunday in the south

buffet laid out in archival

newsprint, that stands on

sand with a story to tell

          of how this land burned

          of how men burned

          of how people burned

how they struggled for better lives

     for the Colossus of Capital

          failed

     for this town, built up

     now falling down.

Jason Baldinger has been writing for over twenty years, he just recently got around to performing it publicly. He's been published in The New Yinzer and has a split book of poetry with Jerome Crooks available now from Six Gallery Press. You can catch his bands House of Assassins and the Skirt Tasters at irregular intervals around Pittsburgh.