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      February 28, 2021On Finding A Coney Island of the Mind in an Antiques ShopJudith Sornberger

      Ferlinghetti, you were my first—
       
              the first book of poems I ever bought
       
          forking over
       
        cash earned swirling soft serve
       
                into cones, squirting
       
              ketchup peace signs onto burgers at the DQ.
       
      Back when almost
       
              every sunset above the kitchen sink
       
        in the wounded wilderness of Omaha, Nebraska
       
                  occasioned a rebirth of wonder
       
      even as the war plowed graves
       
          for guys who could’ve been my boyfriends,
       
        my friends and I donning black
       
                armbands and occupying our high
       
          school’s center staircase singing
       
      We Shall Overcome                     back when
       
        my first French kiss was startling and sweet as a surrealist
       
          treat from your pennycandystore beyond the El
       
      and I wanted to be your girlfriend
       
          to leap
       
              from one
       
                  line to the next
       
      till I joined you and your wild pals
       
            in San Francisco—the purely naked young virgin
       
          ignored by the crowd watching the erection
       
                  of the St. Francis statue
       
      and singing to herself
       
        to the syncopated
       
            clickety-clackety rhythm of typewriter keys
       
      in my basement bedroom in the ‘60s suburbs.
       
          Somewhere in the next five decades I misplaced
       
                your circus of the soul,
       
                  its phallic towers lit like Xmas on the cover
       
          maybe during the wild hot ride of child-birth or
       
      skedaddling from one hapless marriage to another.
       
            So, I’m walking down these aisles
       
        of what-once-was—the abandoned and the tawdry—
       
          a kewpie doll won by some boy for his girlfriend
       
      missing most of her carnival feathers; a pressed lead Indian minus
       
            the horse his curved legs once embraced, an engagement
       
      ring whose diamond is rheumy as ancient eyes
       
            but here you are for two bucks and in great shape for your age
       
              glowing like a renaissance of wonder
       
        like the absurd,
       
                  arcane belief I came here for a reason.

      from Poets Respond

      Judith Sornberger

      “This poem is written in response to learning of the late great poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s death this week. The first book of poetry I ever bought was his A Coney Island of the Mind when I was a teenager. Learning of his death reminded me of finding—a few months ago—a copy of that book in an antiques store.”

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