Elegies for New York Avenue
Melanie Henderson
Main Street Rag Publishing Company
ISBN: 978-1-59948-330-6

Reviewer: Michael Adams


          I remember the Washington, D.C. that Melanie Henderson evokes in her debut collection from summers in the 1950s spent with relatives in the working-class neighborhoods of the city. Although my recollections are separated by several decades from the D.C. that Henderson grew up in, there are still the same essential qualities of a lived-in, gritty city of row houses, walk-up flats, stoops, and playgrounds of cracked and weedy asphalt.

          Henderson’s D.C. is not the shining, sterile city of marble and granite monuments, reflecting pools, and clipped, expansive lawns, but rather the lived-in metropolis of

Burnt avenue sun pressed on,
black pebbles of afterschool
afternoons, and yelps of boys
on the verge of victrola, smack-
talking themselves into men.

(“Elegies for New York Avenue”)

          I appreciate the way Henderson combines a conversational narrative style with playful internal rhythms and rhymes such as “afterschool afternoons” and “verge of victrola.” The two approaches complement one another and serve to hold the reader’s attention. Henderson clearly has a strong sense and feel for the oral and auditory architecture of poetry, as is evidenced in “Be Real Black,” a lyrical and generous love poem.

Let the brief cool of fall
pour like milk from the mouth
of a hand-made antique,
grow pretty as a lily
worthy of your pauses.

Let all that is black, continuous,
unchanged, magical,
sprinkle like a hush,
surrender to dizziness
whenever your lips part crookedly
casting my back’s arch,
setting me straight like teeth
perfecting organs of speech.

          Elegies for New York Avenue is divided into four unnamed sections. The first, and longest, section is a series of elegies: for New York Avenue (the longest poem in the book), for Little Benny, for Salim, and for Dominic.

Of murders. Of warmness too:
Oh ripe, ripe clank
of orange ball bounce,
tattered five-gallon buckets,

sticks singing ghosts
off of ashy milkcrates
at corners, in medians,

I want to remove the wool
cloak of cocaine and high winters
from their summer backs
instead of music, metal cash in their cups

dimes, nickels, a day dodging traffic signals,
still, the carryout fills with the cardboard funk
of 3-week stench, Mumbo sauce
and fried chicken, cole slaw: reward.

(“Elegies for New York Avenue”)

          Henderson yearns to remove that “wool/ cloak of cocaine.” Of course, she cannot, but she can write of these lost friends and acquaintances with love.

          Here is “His Corpse Was Beautiful,” for Dominic Adam Dixon (1990-2011):

Locks like rows of wheat.
Skin, rich, even, like mud pies
kids pat out with stubby,
uncoordinated fingers and palms.
His nose, unsunk & prominent
like a lynching tree
whose limbs decline to
fail under a body’s worth
of weight. Those lips, darkened,
full as the smoke which rose
slow from them, wrapped
itself into the sky. The suit—
I hated the suit; it was far too still
for a resting person. No one
sleeps in suits. Or Boxes.

          There is a wealth of arresting images here for such a short poem. And really, don’t those last three lines ring so true?

          If section I’s poems are elegiac, section II contains poems that are generally more hopeful, though perhaps not easy-going or even necessarily forgiving in their hope, as is displayed in “The Mothers,” the section’s opening poem.

We birth the babies & weep
forever in between boards
& hot irons, their creased smiles
make the water beneath our faces
dissipate like cooling steam.

          And at the end of the poem:

Silence visits us every day,
coaxing our hands to push the irons,
to press wrinkles out of every breath
—taking threat—with tears and fury,

on four legs or two, with calm strands
or wild snakes—we swing our babies low
to freedom, away from the drooling pack.

          The tone throughout this section remains one of fierce hope mixed with fear, until the final poem, “Old Water Run.”

Moons for the taste of tears
so long a branch, reaching
out of reach, there’ll be no rain
for gathering dampness, soft
belly welted for witch hazel,
points of ink, no settings
for an unrisen sun, stories may be,
maybe for the hand
extending plums          —plum.

          This poem, mournful in its tone, yet playful in its use of language, provides a nice segue to section III, in which Henderson gives the rhythmic and sonic qualities of her poetry freer reign than in the rest of the book. Many of the poems have a be-bop feel, rolling and tripping off the tongue. These are poems that want to be read aloud. Earlier in this review I quoted in full “Be Real Black,” the opening poem of this section. Here are some lines from “Rubbing English”: “learning the language of a man/ harrows   harps   hovers// in a woman’s worry to be fresh/ soiled and supple enough/ to absorb the speech of eyes….” Again we see how Henderson uses rhythm and internal rhyme to nail the speech of the street.

          One of my favorite poems in the book, replete with playful tone and simple abandon of pretense, is “When Good Women Must Murder.”

Roaches

they climb on my
tenement walls

run over my floors
like they paid last
month’s rent…

I lifted my shoe
to shew a gathering of them away...

but this
one

did not budge

instead he turned to face me....

          The poem then takes on a kind of slapstick quality:

I looked at him
with his hairy see-through legs

then back at the shoe
in my right hand

then back at him again
thinking
this little mofo’ done overstayed his welcome....

          This piece reminds me of a poem by the mid-century California poet Lew Welch, “Buddhist Bard Turns Rat Slayer.” Both poems come at you with a playful abandon, while a serious current runs underneath.

          Section IV, the shortest in the book, is a requiem for Henderson’s ancestors. The poems are elegant and simple in their tone, love and longing overshadowing word play.

Which settled ancestor gifted a family a young child,
beaming oil eyes frequent a humble altar,
lacking proper salts, blood-rich powders?
Grandma watches, directs the tired saints,
obligatory love, work in far transit of life,
a dusty blue Madonna breaks over an old flight of stairs....

               ("Bop for the Non-Beauties")

          Elegies for New York Avenue is a fine book of poetry and an excellent introduction to a young, emerging voice.