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The Lives of Jazz Fathers
Let’s resurrect the trumpet players;
the saxophonists named for fauna gone
extinct in the Congos and Barrios,
the worship and wail, the shadow song
of 40s Noir—black and white ailments
of New York’s terminally cool.
There are no more quartets—
only quartered ensemble split from
cities coated to chin, faces blurred white
in pedestrian winds and yellow cabs.
Now, the drummers search estate sales, rummage
for swivel stools to post on Etsy. The bassists
study Phlebotomy, read blood panels for Diabetes.
The pianists work dental offices, drill tartars
to reveal the whites of cuspids. The saxophonists
teach Tai Chi classes, sleep at the Chinatown Y.
I mean to say I miss them: the notes who stroll
October for pick up chess in parks
with coffees and fingerless gloves; the chop
chords at brick-and-mortar steak houses;
the soloists smile in the amber memory
of nightclubs numb with intoxication.
They’re dead – the blue veranda is silent
where they jammed, moon drift in palm
leaves and ivory; notes of copper and zinc.
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Jacob Anthony Ramírez is an educator and poet. He is a distinguished graduate of Lancaster University’s Creative Writing M.A. In 2022, Oxford Brookes University’s Ignition Press released Kitchen Boombox, his debut pamphlet. His poetry appears in The Breakbeat Poets, LatiNEXT, The Best New Poets 2022, and Latino Book Review. He is currently at work on his first full collection in Sonoma County, California, where he lives with his wife and two children.
__________________________________________________________________________________ William P. Gottlieb, Portrait of Thelonious Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge, and Teddy Hill, Minton’s Playhouse, New York, 1947.
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