Because this isn't your typical hometown newspaper, the Voice brings you a creative outlet for your poetic leanings. This feature is edited by Don Berger.
The Voice encourages Silver Spring and Takoma Park residents
to submit their original work to Vox Poetica. Email your poems to poet@takoma.com,
or mail them to the Takoma Voice/ Silver Spring Voice, 6935 Laurel Ave., suite 207, Takoma Park, MD 20912.
June 2009
Roscoe Magnus
Behold me here imprisoned now in bronze
Where once I held command of this great street —
Cock of the Walk who strode with Rooster gods.
“O Roscoe you’re the One, just like the Fonz
Was once,” they’d cry and gather at my feet.
Behold me now imprisoned here in bronze.
I strutted all about just like the Lords,
My coxcomb high — I was among the great:
Cock of the Walk who strode with Rooster gods.
I had an eye for Chicks — with fowl glands
I took the measure of their tender meat.
And now? Look at me fettered here in bronze.
Oh! I’d rather be a lonely Hen who plods
Each day and has to beg the smallest treat.
Aieee! Me, Roscoe who strode with Rooster gods.
So go you Passersby and Common Clods —
Know that you too will leave in lone defeat.
Gaze on me now imprisoned here in bronze
Cock of the Walk who strode with Rooster gods.
— Anonymous, 2nd century BCE
Translated from the Latin by Merrill Leffler
 “We’ve lived in Takoma Park since 1977 and in our house on Sherman Avenue since October 1979. I remember Roscoe who I saw a couple of times but heard more often when I walked about in Old Town.
“The city’s bronze statue to Roscoe has struck me over these years as funky and so Takoma Park—visit any city here or in Europe and what do we see but great bronze statues of military men, heads of countries, poets (England), philosophers (Edinburgh). What other city has a statue at its center to—a rooster! Not a rooster named Plato or Alexander, but Roscoe! Only one with a nuclear free zone. So I think the poem started there -- my homage to Roscoe and Takoma Park. A homage that had to be comic and heroic—mock heroic.”
— Merrill Leffler,
standing by the poem in front of Roscoe's Neapolitan Pizzeria
June 2009
Holiness
A tangerine and clouded sun
has drawn me to the gambrel’s back:
Antenna and chimney pot, the rucked
tin a fragile membrane.
Too fragile in one spot
where it has split
and would let water percolate
down the grain lines of old wood, if not
for a patch of plastic sheet, which explains
why on waking I can watch a slight
sliver of the sky grow light
unbothered by the rain.
This miracle, that god
would show through polyvinylchloride.
Luke Phinney
June 2008
Please
Please, we’ve done everything,
you know? Can’t I go home now?
When “horses” drink: an answer to a question
no one has ever asked,
at last around what used to be called
the water cooler without
identity theft something to think about,
your soul all baseball stitched with truth.
Until we are considered the complete fourth of a person,
the sun’s straying to the outfielder in Lane’s Eyes
by virtue of the sound coming out of the ears
Instead of into them,
alexandrines that would put to shame
the entire eighteenth century of French drama, its
verse ladders burnished a pale beer
color from the grip of hand over perished hand.
The day is long because it is long, wild duck as cooked in the valleys. You asked
for cream of mushroom soup to be put on the menu. Cream of mushroom soup
will be added to the menu cycle. You asked for labels to be added to our Smart Sweet
Desserts on the buffet. As of Tuesday January 3rd all SSD will be labeled
“Shrill But Heroic.” Reservations with your name
have been made in justice, suing
for peace in its original sense of not
waiting too long,
Arthur Malloy
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