Lucia Galloway
“Ginseng on Court Street” explores the tension between social norms and expectations and freedom—the many little ways we break free to be “ourselves.” Change—the normal alterations in the structure that take place over time—can also seem like species of disobedience.
_________________________________________________________________________________________
TOC | Next
Ginseng on Court Street
in honor of Josephine D’Esposito, 1927-2004
I. Disproportion
Respite from being useful was
what mattered to me then amidst
the disproportion of a family Christmas
in the homes of my grown-up children—
clearing the breakfast table,
pouring their cups of tea.
I found it sauntering the Brooklyn streets
in Carroll Gardens: Court Street shops
of tailors, bakers, stationers, and sellers
of used dishes—those old Italians ready to chat
or cheat me when I poked in to nose around.
II. Josie Pours Half-and-Half
Ancient athletic pants and a worn fleece pullover,
two white braids dangling beside her ears from the plush
of a red velveteen cap—I wanted her to be
Mrs. Claus in Brooklyn. She nailed me for a stranger
as I crossed her threshold. “Josie Java,” she hollered,
“Gotta pee.” And she left me standing amidst the tinsel,
colored lights, the small unhopeful Santas dressed in dingy velvet.
I found a place to sit at one of the mismatched tables.
Josie presided from her counter perch
and barked my order to her cook, got up
to serve my eggs and bacon on a paper plate.
Her only grace was whitening my cauffee.
“Say when.” and then she wheeled around,
reclaimed her right to gossip with the regulars,
relished some news of the day: a Chinese woman mugged.
“They went into her boobs for it,” Josie howled.
III. Demography
Once it would have been an Irish Christmas.
For some time, though, the Caputos and Friellos, the Raccuglias
and the Leones have set the tone in Carroll Gardens.
Josie’s Java held its place on Court Street in the block between
Frank Caputo’s cheese shop and St. Mary Star of the Sea.
Last June, inside a letter from my daughter
a tribute clipped from the New York Times
to Josie and her place. For us, that dim establishment a novelty:
neither of us had been there more than once.
Imagine, then, Memorial Day, the grate down
before the door of Josie’s shop and mass being said for her,
dead of a heart attack at 76. Dead after pouring countless cups,
dead after calling me Sweetheart. After adding the price
of the daily paper to my tab and squabbling with the
customer who brought his own to read while sipping.
IV. A Sense of Place
“I’ll miss her, yelling over there,” said Andy Cho,
businessman, from his health-food emporium
across the street from Josie’s Java. Maybe Mr. Cho
stopped in at Josie’s wake, placing a pot of white chrysanthemums
beside the gaudy sprays of long-stemmed gladiolas,
murmuring condolences with eyes lowered to the shoes
of Josie’s four grown sons. Maybe.
It’s Josie’s moxie that I’m thinking of.
That raw December day, the lights of Christmas winking
and her harsh notes sounding, already of the past:
a moment distant enough for two strangers to meet,
reluctant hostess, nosey guest. I had stepped into her place
to forget whatever it was that kept us pouring.
"Ginseng on Court Street" first appeared in Lucia Galloway's book, Playing Outside, reprinted by permission of Finishing Line Press.
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Lucia Galloway’s poetry collections are Venus and Other Losses (Plain View) and Playing Outside (Finishing Line). Recent work appears in Tar River Poetry, Comstock Review, Midwest Quarterly, Inlandia, Mason's Road, and the anthologies Thirty Days (Tupelo) and Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Beyond Baroque). A top-prize winner in Rhyme Zone’s 2014-15 Poetry Contest for her poem “Open to the Elements,” Galloway also won the QuillsEdge inaugural poetry chapbook competition for her manuscript The Garlic Peelers. Her manuscripts have been finalists for Tupelo’s Snowbound Chapbook award and the Able Muse Book Prize. She hosts Fourth Sundays, a reading series at the Claremont (California) Library.