Artwork © Ira Joel Haber

 

‘The Fort’

You assured us the lumber was salvaged scrap, not stolen
from the jobsites in that new subdivision, Harbor Wood Estates,
going in where there had once been forest and old logging roads.
You framed a gable roof atop the massive granite boulders that’d been
          pushed
to back of the lot when the cellar hole was dug for our house.
You made a trap door with rope for hinges and a pull
to access a small, dark attic room.
You called it ‘The Fort’ with pride and we’d have to defend it as one
when a gang of boys from another neighborhood said they planned on
making it their club house. ‘The Speed Breed’ all rode three-speed
          bicycles,
with those weird, long banana-seats, crash bars in the back.
They threw rocks at smaller kids sometimes as they pedaled past them.
It never happened to me, but I’d heard it was so.
The leader of their pack smoked cigarettes he’d stolen from his parents.
His father’s Marlboro’s sometimes, more often his mother’s Virginia
          Slims.
When he told you he was intent on having ‘The Fort’ as his own
you said only—go ahead and try— and banded together the Pond Street
          kids,
mostly my age, your army to face down the siege. We were all to bring
trash can lids from home to serve as our battle shields, you carved us
          swords
and spears from fallen oak branches. We repelled their first assault, too.
Paul M went home crying with a cut on his ear, our only casualty.
I remember the Peace Talks that went bad. We’d gathered in Kennedy
          School Field.
Six of them, six of us, seated in a circle, stationed like numerals on a
          clock.
Was it some sudden snag in the negotiation, or had they planned it all
          along
when they leapt up at us, closed fists opening to show us sharp stones?
I remember being lifted off my feet, one of theirs meant to make me his
          hostage,
had me under one arm. I remember the look on his face as our brother
          stopped him,
how, as my would-be-captor let me fall, I hit the ground running.
‘The Fort’ was only up a few days when you had to take it apart again,
          piece by piece.
You slow-walked, seething, each board back to the site you had taken it
          from.
I can’t recall if I offered to help you, or if somehow I knew that I
          shouldn’t.

 

Tom Driscoll is a poet, columnist, and essayist who lives and works in Lowell, Massachusetts with his wife, artist Denise Driscoll. The Champion of Doubt published summer 2023 from Finishing Line Press. PW/Booklife said about the book, “…amid the brutal truth telling, an adhesive connects all the stories, memories, and confessions: love. In “Citizen Cain,” Driscoll writes “Once you’ve been broken there is a different tenderness” and it’s this that allows love to thrive for the damaged person, the damaged country, the damaged world.” Tom Driscoll’s poetry has appeared in Oddball Magazine, Carcosa Review, Scapegoat, Paterson Literary Review, and The Worcester Review.

Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, writer, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in the USA and Europe and he has had nine one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum,The Albright-Knox Art Gallery & The Allen Memorial Art Museum. Since 2006 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 300 online and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Creative Artists Public Service Grant (CAPS) two Pollock-Krasner grants, two Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grants and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. in 2017 & 2018 he received the Brooklyn Arts Council SU-CASA artist-in-residence grant.