couldn't ask for a more insightful understanding of what i intended with this work and the effort that went into creating it:
https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2025/06/jerome-sala-getting-it-right-michael.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawK1S3VleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETE1SWc0dkZlTHhNbTBFVW81AR6Ml7TM_e2b-u3iKSTQXPFCcpTTkoc9kLRLnUmriq0fSlr0ZLM9xDlS6YZ_WQ_aem_C7Z_F_Y_ppTrCXDIEDdjBw
Two new poems of mine in Innisfree Poetry Journal 40. Thanks to editor Greg McBride, and to Terence Winch (who's got great poems in this issue) for connecting us. Check it out:
Not to beat a dead horse, as they used to say when I was a kid about futile actions, but given my present physical and mental limitations, listing all the great things that happened last year, including the publication of many fine books by friends I love, is too challenging, so I'll toot my own horn one last time about the new book of mine published by Beltway Editions in 2024, and express my gratitude to those who noted it by giving it rave reviews on amazon, an entity I oppose but nonetheless the only place I know of where SAY IT AGAIN:An Autobiography In Sonnets was noticed.
I've known him always as my cousin Rod who was a few years older than me and grew up next door on a street with three houses of cousins and our Irish immigrant grandparents so was known locally as Lally's Alley. We spent so much time in each others houses the cousins on my street felt more like siblings and Rod was the big brother (my actual big brothers were in their teens when I was born).
Rod was my hero when we were kids . He was so cool in the early 1950s in his black leather jacket (I saw photos of him in it at one of our Lally clan reunions but haven't seen them since), and when he got stabbed in a fight at a drugstore soda fountain and refused to tell the cops who did it (and we had cops in the clan) and had his arm in a sling for a while,
And then he got kicked out of high school for something you wouldn't today and he and his girlfriend Paula got married and he went to work at the A&P at the bottom of our street and eventually moved further South in Jersey where they had a bunch of kids and a wonderful life until Paula passed and then he met Cathy and continued to have a wonderful life.
As has been said by those who were closest to him, like his son Richard, for Rod the glass was always 3/4 full. Thank you for being an exemplar of joy and for always making me feel loved Rod.
[photos of Rod with his actual siblings and with his widow Cathy, deepest condolences to you all and to Rod's kids and grandkids and great grandkids.]
Some of the Lally clan that made my Thanksgiving so full of laughter and love (from viewer's left to right behind me): my grandkids Donovan Lally and Deak Hotaling, my youngest Flynn Lally, my niece Michelle Lally Doyle and her husband Mike Doyle, my oldest Caitlin Lally Hotaling and her husband Ed Hotaling. As always, I feel like the luckiest person in the world.
[my son Miles and his partner Hannah, who are my housemates and caregivers, were at Hannah's family gathering]
My eldest, Caitlin, being featured in a promotional post for the hardware store she works at. Her grandfather, James Lally, co-owned hardware stores during his lifetime, up until my boyhood, so it's in our blood. Proud of her, as I always am of my kids and grandkids.
Two favorite photos of my youngest child, Flynn, and me goofing when he was around 5 and 23. He just turned 27 and every day makes me grateful and proud.
Daughter Day is every day since late February of 1968 when Caitlin graced my life with hers. Here we are back then, and in early 2019.
Angels on my shoulders: Jeannie Donohue my right, Sue Brennan my left.
This photo was taken in '64 on the Western edge of the state, where our friends Roy and Karen Harvey lived on a boat they bought with student loan money. It captures Lee's stylishness then (she made the outfit she's wearing) and our height difference, she was 4'11'', I was 5'11' then. We divorced in the late 1970s and in 1980 she went into a coma after a botched operation which she remained in until her passing in 1986.
I think of her revery day.
Years ago, poet and dear friend Don Yorty filmed me in my then Jersey apartment home reading my poem tribute to my long gone father, called SPORTS HEROES COPS AND LACE. I wanted to repost it here, but my infirmities makes figuring out how to do that and then doing it extremely challenging (I've had to correct my mostly one-finger typing while writing this again and again etc.). It's on Vimeo, if anybody would like to hear it.
There're no photos of my mother (the class of the clan who I adored) and me without one or more of my siblings around. Here's a good example c. 1954. Me in Hawaiin shirt with my three brothers to my right, Franciscan friar Father Campion (Tommy) behind our mother, music teacher Buddy (James), his wife Catherine with their baby Cathy down in front, and cop Robert, leaning over his wife Sis (Marie).
In front of me is my Grandma Dempsey, my mother's mother who lived with us, and my sisters Irene and Joan (with pixie haircut), our dad sitting on the arm of our couch. I grew up in a crowd.
The way members of my clan watched our new thirteen inch black-and-white TV when I was a kid. That's me in front, my sister Joan behind me, my next door cousin Marylynn in white with our down-the-street cousin Micki behind her, and our next town (Orange) cousin Rosemary behind Micki, and on the couch my mom and Aunt Rose, a widowed single parent to Rosemary (Rose had a day job so Rosemary spent most of her time with us), and my brother Robert. There's also my mother's mother who lived with us and more siblings and cousins out of frame.
My maternal grandfather, Tom Dempsey, died when I was a little boy, but I remember him. I knew he was known as "the silver thrush" for his singing and that he had owned a tavern in Newark where he and my grandma Dempsey lived until she was widowed and moved in with us.
But I never realized he was actually a vaudeville headliner back in the 1800s until my niece Lisa shared scrapbooks handed down to her mother, my sister Irene, and I saw these programs. What a delight to now picture my grandfather when watching classic movies with vaudeville scenes, like YANKEE DOODLE DANDY or GYPSY et al.
Another photo of me and my siblings during World War Two. Back row, left to right, Buddy, Tommy holding me, Robert; front row, Irene and Joan. They're all gone now, but what an impact they had on me as a boy.
My siblings and me (another one, between me and my closest sister, died as an infant thus the bigger step down to me) on Easter 1944 during WWII. Me soon to be two, and my two oldest brothers joining the military before the war ended. All gone now, except for me.
