We welcome Vicky Schwab!

Vicky Schwab has moved to Newport from Ohio.  We're so glad she found us.  Here's the poem she read, with a fine steady pace that kept it rolling:

Blaming Ohio                                              

Vicky Schwab, center

    Disease is not of the body, but of the place. -- Seneca

The money's gone, the mills are all shut down,
a town of ghosts and gutted shops.   Main Street's 
lined with taverns sprouting from the mold of

buildings gone to rot; the opera house,
her fancy grillwork ruined, a flophouse
for winos, gypsies, convicts on the run.

Saturdays, for fifty cents we'd have our
fortunes told and after, to Coney Island
last nickels spent on hot dogs heaped with sauce.


Had our father founds out, they'd have skinned us
alive.  The day the King of the Gypsies
died, we watched the shiny black hearses crawl

like beetles past our house.  That summer
we played along the creek bed, near the tracks
where my father hitched trains as a young man

dreaming past Westinghouse, Ohio Brass,
Mansfield Tire, Cyclops Steel, giant
foundries lit against the night, silent now

and still.  I lay between freshly laundered
sheets, mindful of the train's low wail, a
promise of worlds beyond my narrow berth

of silos and cornfields hushed at dusk, the
whisper of hatted ladies in church, the hush
of scandal over pearl-handled knives, best

china for the guests, vowing to escape
this white-domed sky, like a teacup over-
turned and me beneath, struggling for air.