Cheryl Anne Latuner
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The Ballad of Sackman Street

Poetry

--
Picture

My family had stories. I had memories.
Woven together, they became the tale

of an immigrant's struggle for dignity 
in the experience of raising a family 
in America.



     I knew my grandfather's,
     my Nonno's footsteps,
     echoing in the stairwell at Sackman Street,
     three flights to his apartment door.
     The parcel under his arm,
     palpable: shoes.
     My grandmother waiting to receive them
     with the bread, the fish.
     His skill, his passport,
     his contract, his insurance,
     his vessel, his ship to America.

Picture
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Hard, dark soles. Soles hard enough
to float. In the village where he was born,
in Canicatti--in a landscape of gashes,
of sulphur, chalk, and gypsum
and treeless brown dunes, Salvatore
had worked making shoes. In his father's
small shop: good shoes, right shoes.



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