Colored Pencil & Posterboard
18″ x 24″

Hoboken Basement

by Julaina Kleist-Corwin

Hoboken Shadows
Bring forth music in the night
Stage dreams fill the heart.

Rock Star Dreams

by Linda Todd

The basement is sanctuary
A place to go hide.
No time for video games
Street football, or TV.
Guitar strings played
Until fingers bleed.

Grades slip with homework forgotten
Dinner left untouched.
Practice late into the night
Before and after school.
If chords strummed right
Rock star dreams come true.

Soul Sanctuary

by Jordan Bernal

My sanctuary
Hoboken basement jamming
Music feeds my soul

My Kid Brother Had a Band

by Lani Longshore

My kid brother had a band
e-i-e-i-o

And in that band there were some drums
e-i-e-i-o
With a boom boom here
And a boom boom there
Here a boom, there a boom, everywhere a boom boom
My kid brother had a band
e-i-e-i-o

My poor father worked in shifts
e-i-e-i-o
And there were weeks that he worked mid (night, that is)
e-i-e-i-o
With an aspirin here
And an Ambien there
Here a growl, there a snarl, everywhere a bad mood
My poor father worked in shifts
e-i-e-i-o

My kid brother moved the band
– and Dad had a good night’s sleep

Musician

by Diane Lovitt

Guitar amplified
Standing alone in shadows
A new star is born.

Untitled

by Patricia Boyle

subterranean
performance
audience of one

Floods

by T. Clauson

“I was here before you. Compared to you, I was forever here,” the shadowy dust bunnies always said to me, sounding like the wash of a lake over pebbles on the shore. The dark shadows lurked in the corners of the stale, dank room. I think they were always there, under the chair, no matter how many times I swept; no matter how many times I dusted the cobwebs in the corners of the room or bought new lamps to place on the end tables.

At night, in the dark, I thought I heard the sound of drums, hands thumping on a stretched buck skin tied with thongs, sinewy to the touch, tobacco pipe smoke wafting up the stairs and through the new wooden door. Sometimes I heard voices that I couldn’t understand laughing, glasses clinking, music…Jazz? I imagined a smoke-filled speakeasy. In the mornings, I always had to air the tobacco smoke out of the basement, and clean confetti from the floor.

Then it came. I couldn’t get into the basement. It was the third day in a row that we Hobokens did not have electricity, and the basement was flooded. The city was flooded; I could barely make it down the street. Our neighborhood pooled all our food and drinks and grilled meat in the street. When I returned home, I could swear that the odor of tobacco seeped in through the floor. It’s pipe tobacco. How could I smell it from the basement at all with all of that water?

I couldn’t reach the basement to dust or sweep. I really needed a bilge pump.

The shadow grew. Maybe it was taking shape and form. A woman from the nineteen twenties, perhaps, or the sixties. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. She drug the shadows behind her as she wanders through the basement, wrapping them around posts, pinning them to a rug. How can I see her so clearly through the murky water with newspapers, flotsam on the lake in my basement? What was in the inky darkness that she swirled like a blanket as she danced?

She gently slid the television cord into her hand and picked over the books on the coffee table, books about shadows that were all written in Hoboken. A look at the ceiling was all it took for the overhead light with its cords to spill like a whirlpool nearly to the floor. After she draped the room in darkness, what would she do? Will the basement forever after be ebony even when a I shine a flashlight into its stormy depths?

Will she squeeze the television cord into an outlet? Dance with the overhead light? When the electricity finally comes back on, will she depart in a bright flash, her minions in fireworks, enveloping the last of the shadows about her as she fled? A redemption in light and color.

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