I woke in the kitchen
Grandma was praying
with her matchbox
filled with cockroaches
Grandmother, Nonna,
in her red smock.
Grandfather was wearing
his jacket inside out
his hair thick with twigs
Aunt Lucy was down
by the dented brass mail slot
waiting for a letter
two babies dropped
out of her
splashing the front
porch with water
the babies got big
in a minute
They could read
but they never learned
Algebra.
One of the babies
lived in a car.
The other baby
sold blow jobs
out the window
down by the factory beach.
Aunt Lucy
had a stroke.
Grandfather died.
Even Grandma’s cockroaches
were nowhere
to be found.
Gerry Albarelli is a writer and visual artist. His fiction, profiles, essays, and poetry have appeared in ItalianAmericana, PEN America, Fairleigh Dickinson Review, and in anthologies such as The Penguin Book of Gay Short Fiction and The Breast. He is the author of Teacha! Stories from a Yeshiva (Glad Day Books, 2000; reissued by Dzanc Books, 2014), which chronicles his experiences teaching English as a Second Language to Yiddish-speaking boys in a Brooklyn yeshiva; and co-author, with Amy Starcheski, of The Telling Lives Oral History Curriculum Guide (Columbia University Center for Oral History Research). He has taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Columbia University Oral History Master's Program. For over twenty years, he worked as an oral historian for Columbia University’s Center for Oral History Research Office. His visual-art series City Lives imagines characters who show up in stories he’s already written, as well as stories he’s probably bound to attempt to tell at some point in the near or distant future. Other images in the City Lives series inevitably reflect some of the many oral histories he’s recorded. His painting City Lives #4 was published in the Fall 2025 issue of The Brooklyn Review.