In the Tunnel
Lucille Gang Shulklapper
And Does the Father
Who Lives in Your Dreams
Die Again When You Awaken?
I’m sitting on our red brick stoop,
in the August sun, my father beside me,
trying to learn the multiplication tables
I skipped in 2B. The only numbers I remember
are black, perched on our maple tree, a wobbly:
85-26 Kendrick Place, Jamaica, New York.
And every number times one is the same number.
The sand is hot between my toes, on the soles
of my feet, blackened by tar near the ocean on
Silverpoint Beach. My father’s feet sink
into the shallow water, while he watches me
plunge into the coiled waves.
On the shore, we find broken shells. A multitude
of soft creatures lived inside of them.
That August, my father dies, and a crow
flies into our chimney, trilling as he falls until
silenced. I close his cracked and broken beak.
How it warms to my touch like my father’s multiplication…
Didn’t he say: Every life times itself is the same life,
like the soul of crushed feathers in the heat of August?
Poetry
ISBN 1-59661-088-3
35 pages/$9
“Poetry is a way of asking questions. We ask questions in order to orient ourselves in the universe, to find our way in the world, or to tease out an answer from inside. Such a simple form—question and answer, call and response, cry and echo—and yet, as these poems show, it bridges the deeps between what we know, and what we don’t know.”
—Richard Jones
author of 48 Questions
“The understated and emotionally-resonant poems in Lucille Gang Shulklapper’s In the Tunnel achieve their considerable power from a combination of formal skill married to the graceful intelligence that arises from close observation and deep feeling. This is a lovely book.”
—Michael Hettich
author of Many Simple Things
In the Tunnel gives the reader a glimpse into Lucille Gang Shulklapper’s life but, more than that, it sheds light on issues many of us deal with: “Where Are the Vineyards of Iron from Where the Meteor Falls?” merges her memories of a birthday dinner at the World Trade Center with 9/11. How can these be meshed? In the wine. “…Later, we bought a case and drank ‘love’ / over and over again, the way I remember / the morning the planes struck / over and over again, / when the cellar and the sky reversed themselves. / But never the word ‘love,’ / nor the full-bodied wine of our lives.” In the Tunnel reflects back to times that ring true by means of the word.
—Robert L. Giron
editor of Poetic Voices Without Borders 2
A workshop leader for the Florida Center for the Book, Lucille Gang Shulklapper writes fiction and poetry. Her work has been anthologized and appears in many publications as well as her three poetry chapbooks, What You Cannot Have, The Substance of Sunlight, and Godd, It’s Not Hollywood.